Solo
by Crookshanks22
Summary: A religious perspective on Hogwarts. Terry Boot, Christian, and Anthony Goldstein, Jew, engage in theological speculation, commit some unconventional mischief, and fall in love with the wrong people. Now complete.
1. Leaving Home

**Solo**

Author note: Diana Summers's intriguing essay, "Secrets of the Class List," got me thinking about Terry Boot and Anthony Goldstein and their tenuous position in the rationalist world of Ravenclaw and the secular world of Hogwarts. My subsequent conclusions and inventions are, of course, my own. Although Jesse Boot, the founder of the pharmacy chain Boots, was a Nonconformist, I've made Terry and his family Anglicans with an evangelical streak. This is, I think, not implausible—as the family's wealth and status grew, some of the Boots might well have returned to the established church, while retaining their evangelical sensibilities.

The plot and characterizations in this story are, of course, informed by my personal understanding of Judaism and Christianity. I know these religions in different ways: Judaism mainly as a practitioner (my academic knowledge is paltry), Christianity mainly as a historian who specializes in the early modern era (Protestant Reformation to 19th century). A few Christian readers have commented that certain key details of Terry's inner life are missing or slightly off-target. I trust their judgment, and I hope that other readers who feel the same way will not take offense. I wanted to write a story about Jewish and Christian students at Hogwarts finding common ground in their (by wizarding standards) abnormal religiosity, and a story like that will, almost inevitably, be written by someone who knows one religion more intimately than the other.

At the conclusion of each chapter, you will find a brief glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish terms that may be unfamiliar to some readers.

**Chapter 1: Leaving Home**

He was mercilessly teased at his Muggle primary school. Teased and teased, and yet how the teachers thrilled to meet his father, and still more his grandfather, and how his small classmates gloried in their fieldtrip to help with inventory, in their full-day holiday among the glorious mess of numbers and colors, of packets and powders and potions. Terry wasn't even a direct heir of Jesse Boot, merely a collateral descendant. Granddad's grandfather had gotten in on the ground floor, bought a few shares and then a few more, and on the strength of those few shares had risen the mock Tudor villa on the outskirts of Nottingham, the missionary lodge in Chad, the Cadbury-Boot scholarship to Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and the modernist communion ware, daintily inscribed to the memory of Terry's great-grandfather, that now graced St. Peter's Parish Church. The grammar school he didn't go to was a fee-paying one, richly endowed, and the friends he left behind were not the children who played kick-the-can in the street of a summer evening but the deceptively angelic fellow sopranos of the Nottingham Cathedral Boys' Choir.

Terry's parents had been quite relaxed and unjudgmental about his wizarding skills. Unusually accepting, as Terry discovered when he went to Hogwarts. They fretted a bit about the lack of religion classes and music lessons, but that was all, and he was grateful for that. So what if he was the only boy in his class who was obliged to spend his summer vacations distributing medical supplies in Chad? There were compensations. The unaccepting ones were his Ravenclaw classmates, whose ignorance of the Muggle world was matched only by their prejudice. He got used to translating soon enough; he got used to telling his clueless pureblood classmates that Mum was a Healer and Dad worked in Potions. "But I thought Muggles didn't have Potions!" protested eleven-year-old Morag McDougal over lunch one day. "Why, what do you think a Muggle does if he has a headache?" exclaimed Terry. "Well, I thought you'd just put up with it, or else you'd—well, die," explained Morag, as Lisa Turpin nodded skittishly beside her. Terry was so shocked he didn't know what to say, especially as Morag was cute to a degree that even an eleven-year-old couldn't help but notice. Then the boy across the table abruptly burst into peals of hysterical laughter.

And so he found Anthony, the only wizard-born boy in their entire year who knew the words "obstetrician" and "pharmaceuticals."

The first time he followed Anthony up three dim flights of stairs to the Goldsteins' rabbit warren of a top-floor flat, the working-class odors of mildew, paint, and cooking grease assailed him. Even more than the day he stepped foot in Hogwarts, he felt as if he were entering another world. The Goldsteins were said to be in the antiques business, but even before he met Anthony's people, Terry had intuited that "antiques" was, in large measure, a euphemism for junk. Seeing their modest, "antique"-filled flat for the first time, he knew his guess was right. Anthony strode off, faintly embarrassed, carrying Terry's knapsack. Anthony's brother Jake, eleven then, was standing at the stove in a Chudley Cannons hat and a frilly apron that read, _Kiss Me, I'm Part-Veela_, cooking hamburgers in the Muggle fashion, with elbow grease instead of magic. (Departing six days later, Terry discreetly inquired why Mrs. Goldstein never cooked, and Anthony said airily, "Oh, Mum was raised Communist," as if that answered the question. Terry still longed to ask, "Don't Communists eat?") At the table, Meir read haltingly from a Superman comic book. One could trace the Goldsteins' ascending Jewish consciousness in the names of their three sons.

That was five years ago. Now he runs up and down those dim malodorous stairs every vacation, and Jake and Meir might as well be his own brothers. They sleep four to a room, on two sets of bunk beds. He serves as their Shabbas goy, flicking the electrical lights on and off on Friday nights when they're not supposed to do so themselves, though Anthony and Meir do it freely enough when their parents aren't looking—Jake not so much. He hangs around the antiques shop in the lazy late summer afternoons and details the intricacies of Hogwarts life to Ruth Goldstein, who is Muggle, and whose curiosity has not been sated by the rushed fragmentary explanations of her male relations.

"How did they meet?" he asked Anthony one evening, that first summer, as they played Gobstones in the more or less private and at least mildly breezy environment of the flat's roof. (The Goldsteins do not have central air.)

"Who meet?" asked Anthony, pawing through a plastic cup of Gobstones.

"Your parents."

"They met at a kosher deli in Whitechapel. Mum was working at the Yiddish Socialist press in Whitechapel High Street, and she used to go in regularly for lunch."

"What about your father? He's pureblood, isn't he, more or less? Did he just like frequenting Muggle restaurants?"

Anthony grimaced. "He liked the pastrami, mostly. Says you can't decent pastrami in Diagon Alley, much less Hogsmeade. Well, he's right, you can't."

Anthony flicked a shiny green Gobstone across the chalk circle they'd drawn on the roof. Terry lobbed a small blue Gobstone at it, sending it off-course. Anthony quickly deflected it with a red Gobstone, which not only returned the green Gobstone to its proper course but sent Terry's blue Gobstone spiraling into a puddle of grease in the corner.

"Good shot."

"I think he was trying to meet a Jewish woman, actually," muttered Anthony. "That's why he started going to _shul_ in the first place, too. Before he got so damned _frum_."

Terry wiped the blue Gobstone on the cuff of his shorts and flicked it into the circle, displacing two of Anthony's.

"Good shot."

"Do you think it's been difficult for him, being married to a Muggle?" asked Terry cautiously. "Or—well, has it sometimes been difficult for your mother?"

Anthony shrugged. "Oh—I suppose. I mean, it feels normal to all of us. I know that some of the kids at school think it's weird, but I'd rather be the child of a mixed marriage than be a pureblood ignoramus like Morag or Lisa—"

"Or Padma," suggested Terry.

"No, Padma's not an ignoramus," retorted Anthony. "I know magic-Muggle marriages don't usually work out well, but it's just not a big deal for us. It hasn't been any harder than—well, than our being kind of poor. Or being Jewish."

"Would you do it yourself?" probed Terry. "Marry a Muggle?"

Anthony shrugged. "Sure, why not? Anyway, I may have to." He aimed a tawny-hued Gobstone at the cluster in the center of the circle and sent Terry's refurbished blue Gobstone spinning out of the circle, unfortunately dislodging two of his own in the process.

"Have to?" asked Terry, dropping the heavy gray-streaked Gobstone he had been considering as a weapon. "_Have_ to? Why?"

"I mean, if I'm going to marry Jewish."

"You wouldn't marry a Jewish witch?"

"You know any Jewish witches?"

Terry considered a moment. "No," he remarked, slightly startled.

"Know how many Jewish witches and wizards there are in the U.K.?"

"Not very many?"

"Twenty-three," said Anthony. "Twenty-three. That includes me, my father, my brothers, my cousins in Manchester—and let me tell you, I am not going to marry a first cousin—setting aside the fact that they're ten years older than me and ugly as sin—"

"I hadn't thought about that," admitted Terry. "So yeah, looks like you'll have to marry a Muggle. And Jake and Meir."

Anthony flicked a Gobstone viciously at the gray-streaked stone Terry had placed near the edge of the circle, and missed. "Or maybe I'll marry out," he said grimacing. "Or maybe I won't get married at all. I'll just take lovers. And concubines. That's one of the things in my _parsha_. Concubines."

"Would your parents mind?"

"If I took concubines?"

"If you married someone who wasn't Jewish."

Anthony shrugged.

"They're really religious, aren't they?"

"Yes," said Anthony gloomily. "But they know the odds. Game?"

"Game."

"'Nother?"

"It's getting dark."

"Okay, let's pack up then. Would your parents mind?" he added. "If you married someone who wasn't Christian?"

"A little," said Terry. "But it's—well, it's different. I mean, being Christian is more of an individual thing. You accept Jesus on your own, and you take communion on your own, and basically, you can be a Christian on your own, even if you're not married to one. What matters is your own true faith. What's in your heart."

"Sounds easier," said Anthony. "But I don't see the point. I don't think I'd bother to be Jewish if my family weren't."

"Jake would," pointed out Terry.

"Yeah," said Anthony morosely, swinging one leg over the brick ledge onto the fire escape. "Yeah, Jake would."

* * *

_Shabbas goy_: a non-Jewish servant who performs certain tasks that Jews are not permitted to perform on the Sabbath. 

_shul_: synagogue

_frum_: pious, religiously observant

_parsha_: a unit of the five Books of Moses (typically, a few chapters) that is chanted in synagogue on Saturday morning. Every Jewish child prepares a _parsha_, or a portion thereof, to read aloud at his or her bar or bat mitzvah celebration.


	2. The Culture Gap

**Chapter 2: The Culture Gap**

The morning before autumn term began, second year, Terry was sitting at the Goldsteins' kitchen table eating breakfast cereal and reading the Quidditch scores from the _Daily Prophet_ aloud to Jake and Anthony. The Boots had returned from their month-long holiday in Chad ten days earlier. Mum was on call at the hospital, and Dad had gone off to a pharmaceuticals conference in Penzance, of all places, so they had parked Terry at the Goldsteins' for a few nights to wait the start of term. The sight of a Hogwarts owl swooping through the window was unexpected . . . and when Mrs. Goldstein tore the missive open, she blanched with chagrin.

"What is it, Ruth?" asked Harvey Goldstein.

"It's the bar mitzvah," exclaimed Ruth, passing him the parchment. "They want us to postpone it."

"_Dear Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein_," Anthony's father read aloud, "_Your request to permit your son, Anthony Goldstein, to absent himself from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for three (3) days during autumn term in order to rehearse for and celebrate his bar mitzvah, has been carefully considered by me and by your son's head of house, Professor Filius Flitwick. Professor Flitwick informs me that your son is well up in his work and that he committed no more than the usual number of disciplinary infractions during his first year_."

"Anthony!" exclaimed Mrs. Goldstein. "You didn't tell me that you—"

"_Nevertheless," _continued Mr. Goldstein,_ "we both believe it is unwise to permit students, especially those as young as Anthony, to absent themselves from classes during term. We fully understand that the bar mitzvah ceremony is a widely practiced coming-of-age ritual for young Jews; but please allow me to point out that students who attain their civil majority, i.e. the age of seventeen, during Hogwarts school terms are not normally permitted to absent themselves from the school grounds on that account. Rather, Hogwarts families are expected to postpone any special coming-of-age celebrations until the next regularly scheduled school vacation. As Professor Dumbledore tells me that the bar mitzvah ceremony is a religious ritual that bears "magical" significance to certain Jewish Muggles, I—"_

"Damned anti-Semite!" exclaimed Anthony's Communist Muggle grandfather, Shlomo Trotsky. "As if _we_ were that superstitious. Jews are a damned sight smarter than—"

Harvey Goldstein cleared his throat and continued: "_I cannot absolutely forbid you to remove your son Anthony from school on this account, but I strongly recommend that you demonstrate your support for his magical education by postponing this Muggle ritual until the winter vacation. Signed, Minerva McGonagall, Assistant Headmistress_."

"Look, I've already learned five _aliyot_ and most of the _haftarah_," said Anthony. "And I haven't got time to learn a whole new _parsha_ from scratch during school term. Hell, I'm not going to learn a whole new _parsha_ from scratch. It's November 7th or no bar mitzvah at all. I'm sorry McGonagall's such a bloody fool—"

"Mum, can I give the owl piece of toast?" asked Meir.

"Nonsense, you have to have a bar mitzvah," said Ruth Goldstein. "Harvey, what are we going to do?"

"P.S.," read Harvey Goldstein, with a sigh. "_Your further request to remove your son Jacob Goldstein from Hogwarts for two (2) days in order to attend his brother's bar mitzvah celebration cannot be addressed at this time, as your son Jacob has not yet been sorted. Following the Sorting Ceremony, I will refer the matter to Jacob's head of house, from whom you may expect to hear in due course. I meanwhile reiterate that the Hogwarts faculty strongly discourage parents from removing their children from school during term for any reason, and that Jacob's education would be best accommodated by postponing your family celebration until a regularly-scheduled school vacation_."

"Damned anti-Semite," growled Shlomo Trotsky again.

"Harvey," cried Mrs. Goldstein, whose Mugglehood made her somewhat timid in her interactions with Hogwarts authorities, "Harvey, what are we going to do?"

"We'll have to change the date of Jake's bar mitzvah," said Mr. Goldstein. "If they can't handle your missing a couple days in November, they certainly won't be able to handle it in May, with exams coming up."

"It's just one day of classes," pointed out Jake. "Thursday evening to Sunday evening. And I don't really need a rehearsal day, even. You can trust me to learn my _parsha_ without coaching."

Anthony sniffed. "I thought that when you became bar mitzvah you were going to_ leyn_ on Saturday afternoon and Monday morning and Thursday morning before you—"

"I said I wanted to," retorted Jake. "But I don't need to. You can trust me—"

"Anthony will have to skip the rehearsal too," asserted Mr. Goldstein. "We'll Floo them out on Friday afternoon, just before Shabbat, and send them back _motzi Shabbas_—"

"Sunday morning, surely," objected Ruth Goldstein.

"Well, yes, I can't see why Minerva McGonagall would complain about that. It's not like any of the students get anything done on Saturdays anyway, eh, Anthony?"

Shlomo Trotsky guffawed. "They spend all their Saturdays playing that wonky basketball-on-a-broomstick game."

"Oh, yeah, it's the first weekend in November," said Anthony under his breath. "I'm probably going to miss a Quidditch match. Damn."

"Clean up your language, Anthony," said Ruth Goldstein.

"Well, at least it's not a Ravenclaw match," muttered her son.

"Mum, the owl pooped on the stove," observed Meir.

"Well, get a rag and clean it up."

"Can't Dad do it with his wand?"

"It won't kill you, Meir. You can wash your hands afterwards. Muggles have to clean up everything that way."

"Well, I'm not a Muggle, Mum . . ."

Harvey Goldstein stood up, stomped over to the stove, and performed a quick _Evanesco_ spell. "Jake, just run a wet cloth over this and make sure I got it all, will you? Meir, put your shoes on, you're coming to the store with Mum and me today. Don't worry boys, Anthony is going to have a bar mitzvah, it will be on November 7th, and we will get you both out of school for it without permanently compromising your standing there. But Jake, you'd better start thinking about a summer date for your bar mitzvah. Look at the _parshiyot _and let me know if there's any particular one you want us to try for. Ready, Ruthie?"

"Coming."

"Stick around for an hour or so until we decide what to do, will you?" said Harvey Goldstein to the owl as he propelled his youngest son out the door. "We may need to send a reply to Hogwarts. Help yourself to the leftover toast if you like, but please don't sit on the stove."

"You're a lucky young man," opined _Zaide_ Trotsky after Harvey and Ruth and Meir had left for the antiques shop. "You've got rich establishment parents, don't you? They protect you from all this."

"They're not Jewish," muttered Anthony. "They don't let you in for all this crap in the first place."

"Anthony—" remonstrated Jake.

"Actually, my parents aren't all that protective," said Terry quietly.

"They let you come and stay with wizards," chuckled Shlomo Trotsky. "They let you stay with Jews. Ah yes, I understand."

No you don't, thought Terry. Not that I blame you. Not that I blame you.

* * *

When he was six, he had cholera. It was his first Christmas in Chad. He lay naked on a too-large cot with a hole cut in the middle and hallucinated feverishly as the bloody excrement dripped out of him. Dad, clad in a shower cap and surgical gloves, paced back and forth, left and right, left and right, the entire length of the ragged tent. Pace—poop—pace—poop—pace—

"Here, Terry, try to drink this."

He pushed away the cup.

"Terry, you know how important oral rehydration is." And he did—that was the strange thing. It was not until several years later—until he went to Hogwarts, really—that he realized that most six-year-olds did not know the term "oral rehydration."

Mum stepped gingerly through the tent's flap door, and Terry half-raised himself on the cot, painfully downing a mouthful of water. Dad gently pushed him back to a prone position and trotted to the door.

"Where's Eliza?" he murmured through his surgical mask.

"With René." René was their impassive but devoted driver/babysitter, who sat patiently for hours on end while Terry's sister Eliza drew his portrait in crayon on paper, chalk on portable chalkboard, or stick on dirt. When Eliza first went to school, it puzzled the teachers no end that all of the figures in all of the pictures she drew were invariably black, and the form mistress wanted to send her to the school psychologist until Mummy intervened. "She's with René. How's Terry?"

Muffled words that he couldn't hear, possibly by design, and then, "Why didn't we have him vaccinated? Sandra, why, why didn't we just get them both vaccinated?"

"Hush, John. God will watch over him. The vaccine doesn't work anyway."

"People die of this, Sandra. You know that as well as I do. René's first wife died of it. Why didn't we—"

"It only confers a temporary immunity," asserted Mum. "There's really no point. He's got type O blood, and that's the worst—"

"Well, it does no harm. God helps those who help themselves. Next summer, before we come out here again, we've got to get them both—"

But Sandra Boot had slipped her husband's grasp and was kneeling at her six-year-old son's bedside. "How's my boy? I can only stay a minute. I've got to get back to the clinic. How's the oral rehydration going? Getting plenty of electrolytes?" Faintly, Terry shook his head. Sandra Boot wrung out a damp washcloth and sponged his face. "Never mind," she whispered, "never mind. It's a good thing, really. In the long run." Running her hand behind his head, she lifted his face dangerously close to hers and whispered with unmistakable satisfaction, "You've really seen Africa now."

* * *

_aliyah _(plural _aliyot_): a Bible passage that constitutes a subdivision of a _parsha_; also, the honor of reciting a blessing over that passage before it is read in synagogue. There are seven _aliyot_ to a _parsha_.

_haftarah_: a reading from the Prophets. Each _parsha_ has an associated _haftarah_.

_leyn_: to read Torah with proper cantillation (more on that coming in Chapter 3!). A short section of each _parsha_ is _leyned_ in _shul_ on the Saturday afternoon, Monday morning, and Thursday morning preceding its full reading on Shabbat.

_motzi Shabbas_: Saturday evening, after the conclusion of Shabbat (the Sabbath)

_parshiyot_: plural of _parsha_ (see Chapter 1)

_Zaide_: Grandpa

Note: Bar and bat mitzvahs are frequently scheduled two or three years in advance, so Jake's bar mitzvah would already have been scheduled by this point, even though he was only eleven and the actual ceremony was almost two years in the future.


	3. Potions and Butterscotch

**Chapter 3: Potions and Butterscotch**

Third year. Potions class. As Snape doled out essence of myrrh with an eye dropper, he announced, "This drug is traditionally associated with kingship—Miss Patil, stop admiring your fingernails and get to work. Kingship is a Muggle political concept, for those of you who have been fortunate enough to lead lives free of the characteristic forms of Muggle manipulation. Their political ineptitude is appalling—worse than our own Fudge administration, which will give you some notion of the abysmal depths to which the Muggles have sunk. Corner, spit out that sweet. Ten points from Ravenclaw. Myrrh is further associated with divine kingship in the Christian tradition—one of several specific manifestations of the Muggle form of superstition known as 'religion,' for those of you who have been fortunate enough to lead lives free of the characteristic forms of Muggle self-deception," he added, eyeing Terry unpleasantly.

"Please, sir, what's religion?" asked Ernie Macmillan, currying favor as usual. Most of the Hufflepuffs preferred to keep a low profile in Potions class.

Snape rubbed his hands together and said slowly, "The word comes from the Latin root_ lig_, to bind. I suppose a Muggle would say that religion is a complex of ideas and practices that bind a person to God. God is a sort of Muggle fantasy of wizarding power—an invisible, immortal creature who intervenes in human affairs to grant special privileges to his favored beings. Muggles use various primitive means to manipulate their imaginary God or gods, principally sacrifice and prayer."

"Sacrifice like giving things up?" asked Morag, puzzled.

"Yes, 'sacrifice like giving things up,' as Miss MacDougal so eloquently puts it. Learn some grammar, Miss MacDougal, or I may dock further points from your supposedly brainy house. Muggles have traditionally killed each other, their children, and their livestock in an attempt to curry favor with their God or gods. They also commonly set fire to their food supplies, even in famine-struck regions. When Muggles reached a stage of social development at which these practices began to seem primitive to them—which took a surprisingly long time—they shifted to an alternative strategy, prayer, which basically involves muttering inefficacious incantations and hoping blindly that they'll work. Needless, to say they don't."

"Why do Muggles practice religion, then?" wondered Su Li, crumbling dried nettles into her cauldron. "Don't they notice that it doesn't work?"

"You would be astonished at what Muggles don't notice. I suppose they find it comforting—a sort of fake magic for those who don't have access to real magic. A dog collar for those who sense they're excluded from something, but don't have the power to overcome their limitations."

It's not a dog collar, thought Terry, you greasy-haired dope. And the binding isn't man to God, or just man to God. First of all, it's man to man.

* * *

Terry was seven when he carried the sloshing tin pail of purified water out the front door of the mission and down the line of gaunt tired women waiting to see his mother. Every single one, from the haggard crone sitting on the steps to the skinny girl of fourteen or so clutching her stomach in obvious pain at the rear of the line, was carrying an infant in her arms or in a cloth wound around her upper body. And every single infant, without exception, was bawling. It was a wonder, he thought, that Mum could concentrate in such a racket—but Mum was deaf to everything when she was stitching fistulas.

He ladled a cup of water for the pop-eyed and pot-bellied four-year-old kicking the dirt at the foot of the mission house stairs, gazing with woeful fascination at the child's infected cornea. The boy's mother took a few sips, shifting the cloth-wrapped burden on her hip, and Terry moved to pass on. But the four-year-old grabbed the tin cup and made to dip into the pail again—which Terry couldn't let him do, as the child had, of course, not washed his hands, and only people who had washed their hands thoroughly with Mummy-approved sanitizer, rubbing carefully for at least ten seconds, were allowed to put their hands in the pail of purified water. Terry grabbed the child's spindly wrist, feeling like a cad, and the child started to bawl, and all the mamas turned tiredly to stare at them, and Terry thought, oh God, if you love me as much as Dad and Mummy say you do, I wish you would create a diversion _right now_. His elbow hit his coat pocket, even as his hand still clenched the child's wrist, and there was a sound of crinkling cellophane. He let go and shoved his hand into his pocket, and lo, it was full of butterscotch.

He didn't know where it came from. He didn't stop to wonder. He shoved a piece in the pop-eyed four-year-old's hand, motioning to unwrap it, and the boy stopped crying at once. He handed another piece to the child's mother, who so astonished she forgot for once to be unselfish and feed the children first. He worked his way down the line, surrounded by toddlers and teenagers clambering for the unaccustomed treat. His pocket was bottomless; there must have been sixty or seventy or even eighty pieces of butterscotch in the small coat pocket. For five minutes he felt like Jesus, multiplying loaves and fishes. But then Eliza, two years younger, poked her head out of the mission house and started screaming, "Mummy! _Mum-m-m-y_! Terry's got candy! _Mum-m-m-y_! Where did Terry get the butterscotch?" And his mother's gaze closed in on him—the cool, appraising eyes.

On the whole the episode did more harm than good. Butterscotch, though less effective than, say, Plumpy-nut, is by no means the worst substance to feed children suffering from malnutrition. It provides a quick sugar boost; its taste lingers on the palate, creating an artificial feeling of fullness and satisfaction that usefully deceives the mind; and it can be consumed without chewing, thus making it relatively suitable for those with mouth sores and rotten teeth. But Terry's five minutes of fame made him the butterscotch boy forever after in the mission village, and onerous though it sometimes was to be the son of the saintly Sandra Boot, it was still more onerous to be the butterscotch boy. The adults understood well enough that the butterscotch was merely an occasional feature, but the younger children followed him around like puppies, panting for treats, and were quite unable to understand that he was_ not_ Jesus and, consequently, did not always have a bottomless supply of cellophane-wrapped butterscotch in his coat pocket.

In private, Terry puzzled a good deal over what had happened. He tried praying for the butterscotch to magically appear again, but it didn't. In the parched heat of the Sahel summer, he walked up and down the line of patients with the sloshing tin pail of purified water, surreptitiously fingering his coat pocket, and nothing happened. He saved up his pocket money and toted boxes of penny candy to Chad, and the grown-up women patients at the clinic smiled, and René's second wife tousled his hair and called him a sweet little boy, sweet as butterscotch, but he felt the gesture was not a great success. And he wondered, how much good it was, to be able to work a miracle, if one could not harness one's miracle-making power to one's will. And he regretfully concluded that the mission village, and the Sahel more generally, needed a mightier miracle than a one-time infusion of butterscotch.

* * *

Anthony brought Jake a package of Fizzing Whizbees from his December foray into Hogsmeade, and Terry brought him a package of Peppermint Toads. It was fun to wander about the shops in a wizarding village unchaperoned—so much fun, indeed, that it gave Terry some bold ideas. He wondered if he could get himself to Diagon Alley unchaperoned, or maybe with Anthony but at any rate no adults, before the summer vacation started. Maybe over Easter, or on the way home for Easter, depending on the trains. Well, he'd have the usual two weeks of Christmas vacation in the arid wastes of Chad to think it over and decide whether it was worth the attempt.

In the Ravenclaw Common Room at the foot of the north tower, they found Jake curled up in an armchair with a heavy leather-bound book and Mandy Brocklehurst's cat Rowena competing for space on his lap. They tossed him the sweets, and the package of Fizzing Whizbees burst open and spilled on the floor. Rowena pursued one across the room, swallowed it, levitated, shrieked, and ran away with all of her fur standing on end.

"What're you reading?" inquired Terry.

"It's a _chumash_," said Jake.

"Oh, God," muttered Anthony.

"No, _kohanim_ mostly, in this chapter," replied Jake.

"Huh?"

"_Kohanim_—plural of _kohen_—the priestly order," explained Jake. "Never mind, it was a stupid joke."

"Why is the page laid out like that?" asked Terry, looking over his shoulder.

"This is the Hebrew text here," indicated Jake. "And the English translation on the left. Then there are footnotes at the bottom of the page, and longer essays in the back, commenting on the text."

"Is it the entire Bible? Old Testament, I mean?"

"No, it's just the Five Books of Moses. But it's all I need to study for my bar mitzvah. See, this section—" Jake held up about twenty pages—"this is my_ parsha_, the passage I'm going to chant in shul. And then this—" he indicated a couple more pages—"this is the _haftarah_, the selection from the prophets that goes with it. Then there's some prayers to learn, if I want to lead services, but I already know most of those."

"Why are there so many squiggly marks above and below the lines?"

"Some of them are vowels, and some of them are cantillation marks. I have to learn all the Hebrew—not memorize it, just read it really fluently—and then I learn the cantillation, and then I'm good to go. I've got about eight months."

"It sounds like quite a performance," remarked Terry.

"Anthony's going to coach me, right, when I'm ready to be heard?"

"Like hell I am," muttered Anthony. "I thought I was shot of Hebrew for good."

"Well, you have to," retorted Jake. "I wouldn't ask you if there were an alternative—but it's not like I can use a tape—"

"What are you using tape for?" demanded Morag, who had heard only the last few words. "Just use a Sticking Spell. It works ten times better."

"I meant a cassette," explained Jake.

"What's a cassette?"

"It's a thing you put money in," explained Lisa Turpin importantly. Lisa's aunt by marriage was a professor at Beauxbatons, and Lisa spoke a little French.

"Not that kind of cassette," muttered Muggle-born Kevin Entwhistle from the armchair opposite Jake's. "It's a device for storing music. Wish we had 'em here. It's dull as ditchwater doing homework all the time without 'em."

"I'll coach you," said Terry impulsively.

"Really?"

"You don't know what you're letting yourself in for," warned Anthony.

"It's fine," asserted Terry. "I mean, I don't know any Hebrew—but I suppose I could learn—"

"That's okay," said Jake. "I'll transliterate the _parsha_ on our word processor over vacation."

"What's a word processor?" asked Morag, oblivious to the fact that none of the three boys was paying the slightest attention to her. Her beauty tended to blind her to others' indifference. She could never quite wrap her head around the idea that there was any boy in Ravenclaw tower who _wasn't _interested in her.

"I think it's a type of lawyer," replied Lisa. "From _procès_, a lawsuit. Or maybe just a law clerk. They process words."

"Oh, for God's sake," muttered Kevin, throwing down his book. Morag and Lisa ignored him. Kevin was a clever fellow, and not a bad person to partner with in Charms class, but he didn't have the pedigree of wizarding achievements, the all-around savoir-faire, that the handsomest daughters of Ravenclaw were looking for.

For the rest of that winter, Terry heard Jake's precise though not exceptionally tuneful cantillation of his _parsha _over and over again, ever Saturday morning in a remote corner of the Ravenclaw common room, until Jake was word-perfect. It cut into Jake's Quidditch practice time, which annoyed Roger Davies, who was grooming Jake for the next Ravenclaw Chaser position, but Jake was aiming for a flawless performance. When Jake shifted to practicing with the heavy black_ tikkun_ with the gilt-embossed cover that he'd brought back to school after the Easter vacation, Terry asked to learn trope notation. Jake was startled, but he amiably acceded to the request, and for Terry, after three and a half years in the Nottingham Cathedral Boys' Choir, the concepts came quickly enough. He couldn't read the Hebrew letters, but the musical notation posed no problem. Indeed, the whole idea of musical notation without notes fascinated him. He wrote to his parents about it, and to his relief they expressed no concern about his spending so much time coaching a Jewish friend for his bar mitzvah. On the contrary, they were delighted to hear that he doing something—anything—musical, and Mum asked hopefully if he wanted to resume voice lessons over the summer.

"You know," Jake sighed after one of the Saturday morning coaching session, "you know, I really don't understand how you and my brother got to be such good friends. You have nothing in common. He's practically allergic to religion."

Terry shrugged. "Well, the pickings are slim here. Anthony didn't fit in either." And faintly, "He knew the word 'pharmaceuticals.'"

* * *

_chumash_— an edition of the Five Books of Moses, accompanied by a translation, extensive footnotes, and the _haftarot_ (selections from the Prophets) that accompany the respective _parshiyot_. Customarily used for synagogue services and private study.

_tikkun_—a "repaired" text of the Five Books of Moses, in which the Hebrew text appears in twin columns, one with vowels and cantillation marks and one without. A _tikkun_ is used to prepare for chanting from the Torah scroll, in which the text appears without vowels and cantillation marks.


	4. Doubt

**Chapter 4: Doubt**

With a pointed stick, René drew a line in the dirt. He leaned against the Boots' dusty green jalopy and said calmly, "Your mother tells me you are studying with witch doctors."

"I—er—yes," stuttered Terry, wondering what Morag and Lisa, or even Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick, would think of that construction.

"You must be careful," warned René.

"It's not like that," Terry reassured him. "It's white magic. I—I mean—" he corrected, "I mean, it's not witchcraft." John and Sandra Boot had trained their children never to use "black" as a synonym for "evil" or "white" as a synonym for "good," but Eliza had learned the lesson better than Terry had, perhaps because she started younger. "It's good magic."

"No magic is good," asserted René, unperturbed. "No magic is bad. _That_ is a European conceit." René had been educated by French Jesuits, and he argued like one. "What matters is what you do with magic. Do you listen to the ancestors?"

"I—er—well, I pray sometimes," stuttered Terry, blinking in the harsh sunlight. "I mean, I try to think what Jesus would want me to do."

"To pray is good," allowed René. "But do not ask too much. Do not set the agenda. You must listen." He paused. "I see you struggling. Do not struggle."

Terry bit his lip. He had never thought of himself as a struggler. On the contrary, he'd always been the peacemaker: at school, in the boys' choir, and now at Hogwarts.

"You have very nice manners," said René, reading his mind. "As good as an English public school boy." He paused. "Better than an English public school boy," he said on second thought. "And your intentions are good. You are a true Christian at heart. But I see you struggling. That is the mistake that the missionaries always make. They feel too much pain. They rush in, with the best intentions, and they set the agenda, and they do not listen. That is why your mother is so beloved."

Terry nodded silently.

"Some in the village say she is a saint."

Terry flinched.

"Yes, I know you do not like it. And your sister likes it even less. Myself, I do not say the good doctor is a saint, but she can exercise her medicine here—her magic—because she listens. She does not impose her will on the world. She does not think of her own pain. She does not think too much of her own power. That is what you must do," continued René. "Study well and master the art of magic, but do not get too interested in your own power, in exercising your own will. The missionaries would like to get rid of the witch doctors here, but I, who am a good Christian all my life, tell you as I tell them, there is no need. Because the witch doctors here do not live to display their own power, to do magic on their own behalf, but to serve the people and to listen to the spirit world. Not to ask, always to ask, but to receive. That is what will keep you on the right path. Be humble, and_ listen_."

"Thank you," said Terry. He really didn't know what else to say.

"I will not say to you, do not do what you are doing," continued René. "I will not even say to you, do not involve your sister."

"Eliza makes her own decisions," mumbled Terry.

René laughed heartily, showing his white teeth. "She was like that when she was four years old. It is good, that. Both of you should make your own decisions. I say only, do not think too much think of your own pain, and do not think too much of your own power. Do not set out to solve all the world's problems before you reach manhood. Study well, heed your elders, and _listen_." He massaged the rusty green door of the jalopy lovingly, smiled a little sadly, and said, gazing out at the sandy fields, "Come now, I will drive you home."

* * *

Terry and Eliza shared a bedroom in the mission house, an arrangement that had been second-nature to them when they were six and four but was becoming dashed awkward now that they were fourteen and twelve—but Mum, of course, never noticed that kind of thing. Dad, when applied to, hung a prodigious amount of mosquito netting and pointed out that there were entire families living in one room in the village.

When Terry walked into their joint bedroom following his conversation with René, Eliza looked up from her work at the battered steel desk they shared and threw a case of drawing pencils at him. The case was soft-sided and, thankfully, zipped, but all the same, it seemed like an unnecessary aggressive gesture.

"What was that for?" inquired Terry, throwing the pencil case on dusty floor.

"Don't do that!" exclaimed Eliza. "Those are my best pencils, and anyway, they're the only ones I've got here—"

"Well, why did you throw them at me then?"

"Mum and Dad are plotting to send me to boarding school."

"So?"

"It's your fault."

"Huh?"

"They would never have gotten this idea if it hadn't been for you having to go to Hogwarts—"

"Eliza, that's ridiculous."

"It's true and you know it."

"Boarding school isn't all bad," ventured Terry. "If you make friends there, it can be kind of fun. Almost like a second home."

"I don't need a second home," sniffed Eliza. "I've already got this—_place_. And anyway, they're not going to send _me_ to Hogwarts. You know what they're like. They're going to make me go somewhere all-girls and frightfully High Church—"

"I don't mean you should go if you don't want to," said Terry hastily. "But it's not my decision—"

"Will you talk to them at least?" asked Eliza. "Dad, I mean. There's no point with Mum. But you're the little magician. You can do anything. Will you at least talk to Dad?"

"All right," sighed Terry. He walked over to the desk and leaned over Eliza's shoulder. "Why can't you draw pretty pictures like other girls?" he asked waspishly.

"I think gallbladders are pretty," retorted Eliza. "Of course, they're prettier when they're healthy. This one had both polyps and gallstones, as you can see. Still, it's hardly the worst thing I've seen. Mum did a tubal ligation last week and the patient turned out to have a huge ovarian cyst—"

"I'd just as soon not see a picture of that, if you don't mind."

"It's not finished yet, anyway," snapped Eliza. "Go talk to Dad, okay? _Now_."

Terry crossed the narrow hallway and stuck his head in the door of his parents' bedroom. Dad was sitting on the camp bed, darning his field coat and simultaneously reading the pharmaceutical agency's latest set of instructions regarding the cold chain for drug shipments. He didn't look much like a millionaire's grandson at that moment, but that was Dad's specialty, blending in.

"Dad, are you sending Eliza to boarding school?"

"Not this year."

"Well, she thinks you're planning to, and she's pretty miffed about it." Dad was silent. "It's Mum's idea, isn't it?" said Terry bluntly.

"She would like to concentrate on the mission more," said Dad slowly.

"Boarding school is expensive," Terry pointed out. "If you keep Eliza in Nottingham, there'll be more to spend on the mission—"

"Your mother is thinking about devoting herself full-time to the mission," said Dad coolly.

"Give up her practice, you mean?" exclaimed Terry. "Move here? What about you?"

"I'm not leaving the firm," said Dad, "but I might switch to flex-time, not work year-round, so I can be here a bit more—"

"Couldn't this wait until Eliza goes to university?" asked Terry. "Or at least till she's in the Sixth Form?"

"Nothing's been decided yet," said Dad, knotting his thread. "Don't worry." Terry stood motionless in the doorway. "I didn't want to send you to Hogwarts, you know," said his father conversationally, after a minute.

"Really?" Terry hadn't known that. He hadn't been so sure he wanted to go himself, actually, but the arrangements all seemed to have been made years before he heard about it—they told him his name had been down for the school since birth—so he followed the path of least resistance. In any case, he hadn't realized how decisive the separation would be. He had thought, in the beginning, that it would just be for a year or two, because how long could it take to learn to do magic? At eleven, Terry had assumed that magic was something one was born with, not something one learned. "Why not?"

Dad smiled sheepishly. "I thought I would miss you," he said. "And I was worried about your moral education. The culture is so different—I wasn't sure what sort of values might prevail—but your mother said you had to go. Children aren't their parents', but a loan from God." He knotted his thread and tore off the excess with a rapid jerk. "But it's not a bad moral education, really, having strange powers and having to learn how to exercise them. That in itself—" He shrugged, set down the clumsily mended field jacket, and started folding up the cold chain instructions. "It's not really so terrible, is it, leaving home?"

* * *

The cavernous old synagogue in Golders Green was three-quarters empty on the stifling hot August morning when Jake Goldstein was called to the Torah as a bar mitzvah. In the front row, sandwiched between Anthony and _Zaide_ Trotsky, Terry shifted uncomfortably in his scratchy dark blue suit and followed along uncertainly in the English of the twin-columned _chumash_. The Hebrew words were quite familiar, but in all the months of catering to Jake's preoccupation with fluent Hebrew pronunciation and perfect trope, Terry had never looked at the English.

"_Tzedek, tzedek tirdof_," sang Jake in a quivering voice, and Terry nodded happily over the English translation: "Justice, justice shall you pursue" (Deuteronomy 16:20). It was a lovely _parsha_, all about justice and organizing courts of law, so suitable, he thought, for Jake. The first man who had recited blessings over the Torah scroll moved aside, and a second was called up. A third, and a fourth. Behind him, Terry heard the old men nudging and whispering to each other. "A fine accent." "Such a credit to his parents." "Such _naches_!" And then Terry did a double-take. "Let no one be found among you who consigns his son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer, one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to the Lord . . ." (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) He read it again. And out of the recesses of his mind, out of the miscellaneous heap of teachings from his primary school religion classes, floated another phrase unbidden: "You shall not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:17). And now Jake was singing the words in his careful awkward baritone in front of two hundred people: "_V'hover haver v'shoel ov v'yid'oni v'doresh el-hametim . ._ ."

Oh, hell, and I got my sister involved. Is that on a par with consigning one's daughter to the fire? Or consulting with familiar spirits? But she wanted to be involved. She figured out what I was doing, and involving her was the price I had to pay for her silence. She was only mashing scarab beetles—perhaps that doesn't count? I'm the one who did the magic.

And the Old Testament was superseded by the new one, right? Right? Surely the religion teacher said something along those lines, back in primary school. Except that Jake and Anthony don't believe that. Jake's trying to organize his entire life around this book, and his parents . . . his wonderful, warm, generous parents. They're so pious, so what do they call it—_frum_—surely they've read this, and how do they live with it? Ruth Goldstein doesn't think we're all damned, does she? Surely intention counts. That's what René was trying to say, that afternoon on the savanna. Love you neighbor as yourself. As yourself, but of course not selfishly. That's what I'm trying to do . . .

"You've got to let me out now," Anthony whispered. "I'm taking this _aliyah_."

"Anthony," he whispered, "whoever chose this Torah reading for Jake?"

Anthony shrugged. "We read the _parshiyot _in the same order every year. This is the one that goes with this date."

"Well, who chose the date?"

"Jake did," muttered Anthony, grimacing. "Jake did."


	5. Young Love and Other Lapses of Judgment

**Chapter 5: Young Love and Other Lapses of Judgment**

Anthony's crush on Padma was of the unrealistic, unrequited, and thoroughly tiresome variety, but it was at least a silent infatuation until Professor Flitwick announced the advent of the Yule Ball. Then it became noisy and obsessive.

"—ask her after Astronomy, or at breakfast tomorrow—except she's so sleepy at breakfast—or slip her a note on the way to History of Magic—then she'd have time to write back right away, because you know Professor Binns never notices anything."

"Mm-hm," murmured Terry noncommittally.

"Well?"

"Well what?"

"Well, which way should I ask her?" asked Anthony, exasperated.

"Mmm," replied Terry. Would immediate rejection or delayed rejection be less painful, he wondered. What would be ideal would be if someone else asked Padma first—which was sure to happen if Anthony stalled long enough—so that Padma could say truthfully that she wasn't available. It was just possible, he thought, that if Anthony asked her now, Padma might say yes, if only for the sake of security, but then she would back out if someone else asked her, especially Michael, but Michael wasn't going to, he was pretty sure, because Michael would rather go with someone more—er—_forthcoming_, and Padma, though indisputably beautiful, was definitely not fast.

"I think I'll write a note," said Anthony. "Easier, you know—I can't chicken out."

What Padma really wants, mused Terry, if she can't get Michael, is a bloke who's high-status but not too interested in her—someone who will show her a good time without making a move—and Anthony's laboring under the dual burden of being nobody in particular _and_ being romantically interested in her—and he's been so obvious about it—half our year knows, for heaven's sake, not just Ravenclaw—

"Terr?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, I think that's fine. I mean, any way of asking her would probably be fine."

"What about you?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Terry evasively. "I was thinking maybe I'd ask Claire."

There was an obvious problem with that modus operandi, but it did not register with Anthony. "Yeah, she's nice," he muttered inattentively. "Yeah, ask Claire."

* * *

Mousy little Muggle-born Claire Dunne wasn't Anthony's type, but then, Padma wasn't Terry's. Claire was the only daughter of schoolteachers—geography and French—and her father played the organ for chapel. She had been raised for eleven years in a home with no television, in a village with no cinema, and she retained an almost Victorian purity of mind. She knew little of religion and less of politics, nothing of pop stars or video games or teen fashions. She knew only books and bookish conversation and the steady punctuation of the thrice-annual vacations, combing the dales of West Yorkshire.

As a first-year, Claire had had a disconcerting habit of asking her housemates to translate the profanity that littered their conversations. She not only didn't know what the words meant but, in many cases, did not even realize that they were profanity, and it took her a while to learn. She had thought they might be some special kind of wizarding slang. Most of Claire's housemates found her mildly irritating. There was something a little otherworldly about Claire.

Anthony had duly slipped Padma a note before History of Magic, but she had not acknowledged it and now, nearly forty-eight hours later, she still had not responded. Profiting from Anthony's experience, Terry didn't write a note. He saw Claire slipping out the Ravenclaw porthole on Saturday morning, and dashed to catch up with her as she walked in to breakfast, the Goldstein boys fortunately being absent. (Jake, who had, as his brother put it, "gotten religion," was no doubt reciting Shabbat morning prayers in his dormitory, and Anthony routinely slept till noon on Saturdays.)

"Going to the Yule Ball?" he asked her, with studied casualness.

"I don't think so," she replied. "I'm just a third-year, you know."

"Would—would you like to?"

"I—well, I—" she stuttered.

"I mean—I mean, would you like to go with me?"

"Oh!" she exclaimed, with candid surprise. "I—thank you, Terry. I—thank you very much." And, after a palpable pause, "I would like to go."

He knew, of course, that what she was meant was that she would like to go with someone else. But someone else wasn't in a position to ask her, and Terry was. And she likes me, he thought. She does like me, in a way.

They slid into seats beside Kevin and Michael and Morag and Lisa.

"—sooo tiresome," Morag was complaining. "I mean, I've said no about four times, and you think she would have the sense not to ask me again, but she just won't give up. It's pathetic. Doesn't she have any other friends she can ask? Like, people who might actually want to—"

"She?" murmured Claire, who of course assumed that Morag was talking about the Yule Ball—a reasonable assumption, given that most of the girls in Ravenclaw had spoken of nothing else for the last five days.

"Ooh-ooh, look at me," shrieked Michael, climbing off the bench and strutting across the floor of the Great Hall in a tipsy crouching posture. "I'm an oppressed house elf! I live in the castle dungeon! I carry such heavy trays! I filch sweets from Dumbledore's office! I get to apparate and disapparate in Hogwarts grounds! Oh, I'm so oppressed! Save me, save me from the cruel fate of working three hours a day!"

"Actually, I think the house elves clean the dormitories at night," offered Claire tentatively. "They don't just wait at meals—"

"Oh, what a hardship!" laughed Morag. "I bet you paid Granger your two Sickles, Claire."

"My grandparents have a house elf," announced Lisa importantly, "and it's really such an easy job, housecleaning. It's not like it's arithmancy. It's not like it's divination. It's just a bunch of brainless scrubbing. My grandparents' house elf comes to my parents one day a week, and she goes to my aunt's one day a week, and dolt that she is, she keeps all three houses clean. And my grandparents give her two new tea cosies a year and they call in a vet when she's sick. They even rented another house elf once, to cover for her when she was ill. For someone subhuman, she's got an awfully good job."

Claire started to say something, and stopped. She was a year younger than Lisa, shorter, smaller, brunette, less pretty (well, that's what most people would say), and Muggle-born. No one could blame her for not standing up to Lisa—least of all Terry, who said nothing himself. He didn't like to admit it, because Lisa and Morag and Michael had been so cuttingly witty about it over meals, but he too thought S.P.E.W. was a pretty good idea. He had seen plenty of illegal slavery in Chad.

"So, what's new?" asked Jake, climbing into a seat beside Claire. "No, I don't want eggs and bacon. Aren't there any plain scrambled eggs? No, no ham. What on earth is that? No, no pheasant. Isn't there anything other than porridge and toast that doesn't have meat in it?" Jake was no longer eating non-kosher meat, which at Hogwarts meant a strictly vegetarian diet—something that the house elves were not accustomed to catering for.

Claire passed him the toast and the marmalade, and Jake smiled a little grimly and said, "What are you doing for Christmas? Idyllic Yuletide in rural Yorkshire?"

"Oh, I—well, I, actually, I think I'm going to stay here for the Yule Ball," said Claire, blushing deeply.

"Oh," said Jake slowly. "Who're you going with?"

"Terry," said Claire faintly. Jake crinkled up his ears, as if he hadn't heard. "Terry," said Claire, a bit more loudly, just as Terry, blushing himself, muttered, "me." Two seats down, Su Li and Mandy Brocklehurst put their heads together and started whispering.

"Oh," said Jake faintly. "Oh. Good for you." He swallowed one triangle of toast, pushed his plate away, and said, "You know, I'm really not in a mood for toast this morning. I think I'll fetch one of the school broomsticks and have a little practice with the Quaffle. Good for you, Terry," he said quietly, clapping him on the shoulder. "Good for you."

"Jake—" said Terry. "Excuse me," he murmured to Claire, pushing the bench in. He ran down the length of the Great Hall and intercepted Jake as he rounded the corner towards the castle courtyard. "Jake, I'm not going to—I mean, it's just a dance—"

"No, I meant it," said Jake. "Good for you."

By the end of term, Terry was wondering whatever had possessed Dumbledore—whom he had always looked up to as such a genuinely _wise_ man—to convene a Yule Ball, when all it did was make everyone feel so rotten.

Padma finally admitted, under strategic questioning by Lisa, that she was going with Ron, and Anthony couldn't bring himself to ask anyone else. Indeed, there weren't many girls left to ask by that point. Instead, Anthony announced loudly to the entire dinner table that he was Jewish ("Really?" guffawed Michael. "You never mentioned it.") and had no inclination to attend a "Yule" Ball anyway. (This announcement might have been more effective if Padma hadn't already divulged the story of Anthony's note to Mandy and Su.) Jake, of course, was a third-year and could not attend the Yule Ball unless invited by an older student—and in any case he showed no inclination to go, or even to listen to gossip about the ball. He walked out of the Common Room every time the girls brought it up. So it looked like the Goldsteins would be clearing out to spend the Christmas holidays in London, leaving Terry cooped up in the dormitory with only Michael Corner for company, which wasn't ideal, for Michael, though clever and sociable, was a bit too full of himself for Terry's taste.

The letter from his parents that arrived on Saturday morning was the last straw. Of course he could spend Christmas at Hogwarts, they wrote. Of course. They weren't going to Chad this winter—the political conditions were just too uncertain, there had been some kidnappings near the mission house—so they'd be staying in Nottingham, with just a modest family party and midnight mass at the cathedral. They were hosting two small charity concerts to raise funds for the mission—Mum was still thinking about giving up her medical practice in order to devote herself full-time to Africa—and they had hoped he would sing, but of course, if he didn't want to come home, they would find someone else. He did have such a beautiful tenor these days and he didn't get much chance to perform at Hogwarts, did he, but it was entirely his decision. They would send him an owl with a plum cake and some of Eliza's homemade gingersnaps and anything else he liked. Terry stuffed the letter back into its envelope (his parents, being Muggles, tended to use envelopes rather than sealing wax), feeling like a wart. And he went to find Claire.

She was sitting in the empty bleachers beside the Quidditch pitch, watching a few third-years knock around a Quaffle. Jake wasn't there; he and Anthony had gone home on Friday afternoon, a few hours before the end of term, by special leave from Filius Flitwick. Erev Shabbat and all, as Jake had forcefully pointed out to the authorities. The sun sets early in December.

"Claire!" called Terry. "Claire!" Somehow it was easier to speak to her here, in the open air.

"Terry!" she exclaimed. "Are you enjoying your holidays?"

"So-so. You?"

"So-so," replied Claire. "I just had a letter from home."

"Me too."

"I think my parents are a little hurt," said Claire cautiously. "It never occurred to them that I wouldn't come home for Christmas."

"It was a little thoughtless of the faculty to schedule the Yule Ball for Christmas Eve," ventured Terry. "I—well, I think they didn't realize that Muggles go to church on Christmas Eve. At least, my family does. When we're not in Africa we go to both the early service and the midnight mass at Nottingham Cathedral. When we are in Africa, we host a carol-singing and Christmas tree for the villagers—"

"My father plays the organ in the village church," said Claire eagerly. "It's a very small village, when the boarding pupils are gone, and the neighbors will notice if anyone's missing. It's really kind of nice to go home to a village that wants one so much—"

"It's just that wizards aren't religious," offered Terry. "At least, I don't think they are—all the religious wizards I know are either Muggle-born or Muggle-identified. I don't think any of them realize that Christmas is actually a religious holiday. They associate it with presents and parties—but not necessarily with families—"

"It will be strange, not being home for Christmas," said Claire, staring out at the Quidditch pitch. "I've never been away from my parents before."

"Do you—do you want to call it off?" asked Terry.

"What?"

"The Yule Ball," said Terry. "It's not too late. We could talk to Professor Flitwick, and we could both be home with our families by tomorrow, or even this evening if we wanted to."

"Oh—you really don't mind? I—I'm awfully sorry to back out on you, but I didn't realize how homesick I'd be—"

"I don't mind," said Terry, thinking, with sudden illumination, it was you I wanted, not the Yule Ball. If hadn't been for Anthony and Michael and everyone else being so obsessed with it, I wouldn't have spent five minutes thinking about the Yule Ball.

"Thank you," said Claire, an indescribably sweet smile breaking like dawn over her narrow delicate features. "It was really, really sweet of you to ask me, but thank you, I really would like to be home with my parents."

If it hadn't been my chance to ask you out, I wouldn't have spent five minutes thinking about the Yule Ball.

Ask her, you fool, said a voice inside his head. When we come back from vacation, let's go into Hogsmeade together. When we come back from vacation, let's go to the next Quidditch match together. May I have your home address, so that I can send you a Christmas card?

Except that you'd rather have a card from Jake, and that isn't going to happen.

"Merry Christmas," said Terry quietly. "Peace unto you, and to your parents."

"Merry Christmas," said Claire, with a light in her eyes like the pale yellow glow cast over nativity scenes on Christmas cards, and she turned away.

That was the only date he ever had with Claire—the one that never happened.


	6. Reassessing

**Chapter 6: Reassessing**

"Get over it already," advised Jake, in a firm but good-natured tone. Terry smiled to himself. Anthony, gazing open-mouthed at Padma Patil emerging from Flourish & Blotts with both parents and her sister in tow, didn't hear. He was clearly engrossed in a private fantasy.

"She _is_ attractive," allowed Terry.

"_And _she knows it," retorted Jake. "Pardon my saying it, but you've got an awfully conceited lot of girls in your year. Except Mandy, and even she's a bit of a gossip."

"Pardon my saying it," snapped Anthony, as the Patils turned a corner and disappeared from view, "but you've got an awfully strange lot of girls in _your_ year. Luna Lovegood with her radish earrings, and Emily Sansom with her lisp—"

"It's just the braces," asserted Terry sensibly. "Her parents are Muggles—"

"—and Claire Dunne who thinks that 's—' is wizarding slang for 'golly gee!'—"

"Lay off," muttered Jake.

"Why're you so sensitive all of a sudden?" asked Anthony indignantly.

Will he ever get it?, wondered Terry, as the hot August sunlight beat down on them. Anthony wasn't very perceptive about human relationships. He tended not to notice things until they hit him over the head. "Padma's all right," he said aloud. "She's not really conceited, I think, just lonely. She's the odd one out in her dormitory, you know—it's always Morag and Lisa, Mandy and Su—and her sister runs around with the other Gryffindors, and there aren't any other Indians at Hogwarts except for that little Slytherin, Anil what's-his-face—"

"Well, maybe," allowed Jake. "But look, Anthony, it's not going to work. She's Hindu, and you're Jewish—"

"I need to stop at the Apothecary," interrupted Terry.

"Again? School hasn't even started yet. You refilled your potions kit when we came through Diagon Alley in June."

"Well, I—er—misplaced a few things."

He saw Anthony and Jake exchange glances, but neither of them said anything. They turned into the Apothecary, and Jake, absentmindedly picking up a packet of desiccated rat parts, continued, "It just doesn't make any sense—"

"I'm not religious," retorted Anthony. "And neither is she."

"Ha!" said Jake. "Who talked Flitwick into letting us go home for the _seders_ last spring?"

"That's different," objected Anthony. "It's the principle of the thing. I don't care about the religious content of the seders—I don't think God's going to strike me dead for eating a ham sandwich on Pesach—"

"That's beside the point and you know it."

"We're entitled to our holidays just like anybody else, religious or not. The other kids get weeks off for Easter, even though most of them have never set foot in a church in their lives—"

"Dumbledore scheduled the Yule Ball for Christmas Eve," interjected Terry, as the proprietor Jughead Jiggers totted up his bill.

"Well, at least that was optional, not mandatory. It's not like he scheduled a Potions exam for Christmas Eve. And _Yule_ Ball—"

"I think you're fighting the wrong battles," said Jake.

"And I think you are," retorted Anthony, grabbing the packet from his hand. "For God's sake, put down those disgusting rat parts. Why're you so set on marrying Jewish, anyway? Just to Mum and Dad happy? Better Muggle than gentile?"

"It seems to work for them," muttered Jake.

"Your children won't be Jewish if your wife isn't, right?" asked Terry over his shoulder. "I mean, the identity follows the mother."

"Yes," said Jake shortly. "But that's not really the point. I mean, achieving a critical mass of Jews in the wizarding community is pretty much a lost cause. It's more about how I want to live my life. It's so ridiculously lonely at Hogwarts—"

"Lonely?" scoffed Anthony. "We sleep five to a room and eat dinner every night with three hundred people."

"And the only way we can have a seder is if we go home to Golders Green," objected Jake. "And Flitwick makes me go to classes on Yom Kippur. Yes, it's lonely. And it's going to be like that for the rest of my life, but if I marry Jewish then at least my home can be an oasis of _Yiddishkeit_, whatever the rest of my life—"

"Finished," said Terry. "We can go now."

"And what if you fall in love?" interjected Anthony in a mocking tone.

"Well," said Jake, in a tone that suggested that Anthony was skating on thin ice, "well, for now I'm trying not to—"

Terry, pushing open the door to the street, thought it was time to change the subject. "By the way," he asked, "is it true that Michael's dating Ginny Weasley?"

"Yeah," said Anthony. "We met him at Florean Fortescue's last week, when he came to Diagon Alley to get his school things. He seems pretty taken with her. Hey, do you want to go to Quality Quidditch Supplies?"

"What's the point?" asked Jake.

"Well, you're trying out for the Quidditch team this year, aren't you? You should look at brooms."

"I can't afford a broom."

"Birthday money?"

"There wasn't much."

"Well, you should ask if they've got anything nice second-hand. You can't go on flying that old scholarship broom—" Anthony gestured at the glamorous new Cleansweep Eleven in the display window. Hogwarts students who were on scholarship, as the Goldsteins were, were permitted to borrow "scholarship brooms" by the year, but most of them were so warped, slow, and unpredictable that they utterly undermined their riders' chances of making any Quidditch team, or of making any goals if they did.

"I don't think I'm going to try out for the team after all," said Jake.

"What? You've been training for two years—"

"I think most authorities would say that flying violates Shabbat."

"Have you asked a rabbi?"

"No, I haven't asked a rabbi."

"Well, you spent half the summer at that damned _yeshiva_—"

"Do you know anyone who's flown the Nimbus 2001?" interrupted Terry, staring fixedly at the brooms.

"I spent three evenings a week at the 'damned _yeshiva,_' as you know perfectly well, and I'm not going to ask a Muggle rabbi to rule on flying—"

"Jake—"

"I'm not telling you what to do. Just let me make my own decisions."

"Jake—"

"Look, just leave me alone, okay?"

"You know, I always thought Ginny liked Harry," observed Terry, trying again.

Anthony shrugged. "Girls do change their minds sometimes," observed Jake. "I don't know what to think. She's pretty, and she's very good-natured—you wouldn't believe how nice she is to Luna Lovegood—but I wonder about her values sometimes. We had a bunch of classes together last year, and I can't tell you how many times I heard her running down the Malfoys because they gave so much _tzedakah_ to the Ministry and other wizarding institutions. I mean, I don't like the Malfoys much either, but making fun of people who give _tzedakah_—"

"The Weasleys aren't very well off," pointed out Terry. "They're not in a position to give much. Maybe it's hard for her—"

"The Goldsteins aren't very well off," said Anthony bluntly, "and we're not in a position to give much either. But we don't run down your family for all the charity work you do."

Terry shrugged, a little embarrassed. "Well, so I chose my friends well. But there's also a bit of out of sight, out of mind. If my parents weren't Muggles, or if we all were Muggles, and you actually had to see the things they do, then maybe you—or, well, not you, but some of the other Ravenclaws—might say that my grandfather was trying to buy my way into Cambridge because he endowed a scholarship there—"

"People say that the Malfoys are trying to buy influence at the Ministry because they _are_ trying to buy influence at the Ministry," asserted Anthony. "And they're not the only ones."

"There's a story going round about Harry," said Jake quietly. "He got arrested over the summer, and—"

"What?!"

"We don't know why. Something about doing magic outside of school—which is unfair, because really most of us do magic outside of school and we don't get caught because the Ministry assumes it's our parents—"

"Yeah, Muggle-borns get picked on," smiled Anthony, clapping Terry on the shoulder. "And those who live with Muggles."

"—and some Dementors. Anyway, he got arrested, and there was a trial, and he got off, and then he dumped a whole bagful of gold into the fountain in the Ministry atrium. At least, that's the story that's going around. Marietta Edgecombe's mother was standing in the atrium at the time and she saw the whole thing. Some people think Harry was trying to buy special privileges, or make some kind of a pay-off—"

"The money that people throw in the fountain doesn't actually go to the Ministry, though, does it?" questioned Terry.

"It goes to St. Mungo's," said Anthony, "but it's all under the same management."

"It's really an invidious position," commented Terry. "I mean, St. Mungo's seems like a perfectly worthy cause. I know the timing makes it look bad, but if Harry had just made a donation to St. Mungo's on a whim, what would be wrong with that?"

"Nothing," said Jake. "Wizards do have a weird attitude towards_ tzedakah_. They always assume there's some sort of underhanded intention. I never really noticed it before—at least, I did, but I thought it was a Jewish-gentile difference, not a Muggle-magic difference. But Claire's commented on it, too—she had this idea about providing guide cats to Squibs, to help them negotiate the wizarding world—"

"Jake tithes his allowance," announced Anthony. "But not to wizarding causes."

"It's not a matter of principle," explained Jake. "It's just that people would think it's weird, and there's a much wider variety of Muggle charities to choose from."

"I wish I could change the wizarding attitude towards charity," said Terry quietly. "It doesn't really seem healthy. I mean, it's not going to build a better world."

"You tithe your allowance too, don't you?" said Anthony suspiciously.

Sheepishly, Terry nodded.

* * *

On the morning of the Ravenclaw Quidditch tryouts, Terry walked out to the Quidditch grounds alone in the pale, chilly September sun. Kevin was sleeping in. Anthony, who had decided to try out even though he was riding a ragged Comet 260 and knew he had scarcely any hope of making the team, had uncharacteristically dragged himself out of bed at eight and gone outside to warm up, and Michael was somewhere with Ginny Weasley.

Claire was sitting alone in the bleachers, in a royal blue windbreaker and neat blue jeans, quietly reading a paperback book as she waited for the tryouts to start.

"Mind if I sit here?" asked Terry quietly. Claire started to push the book into the sleeve of her windbreaker, and then looked up.

"Oh, hi, Terry. No, of course not. Are you alone?" she asked in a tone that might have been hopeful or nervous.

"Jake'll be along later. He's saying his Sabbath prayers in the dormitory," explained Terry. "And Anthony's trying out," he added as an afterthought.

"Yeah, I saw him practicing. He's pretty good, though he seems to be having some trouble controlling his broom."

"Not his fault," said Terry. "It's a pretty old broom . . ."

Claire nodded nervously.

"Please, don't mind me," said Terry. "I don't mind if you want to read—"

"Oh, it's nothing," said Claire. "I mean, I've got all weekend."

"You were reading something Muggle, weren't you?" asked Terry. "Mind if I see it?"

Claire bit her lip—she had beautiful lips, narrow and shapely, like the petals of a rosebud—and silently handed him the book. It was Milton Steinberg's _Basic Judaism_, and Terry felt as if a camel had just kicked him in the chest. He'd helped to treat an old man who'd been kicked in the chest by a camel last summer, in Chad.

"I probably ought to read this too," he said quietly, after a minute. "Is it any good?"

"It's very educational," said Claire. "No, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Actually, it's—well, actually it makes a lot of sense. And I think I could—if—" She broke off. "Look, you won't tell anyone I've been reading this, will you? _Anyone_?"

"Not if you don't want me to," said Terry.

"I'm just—thinking," stuttered Claire. "I'm not ready for anyone to know. And I don't want it to look like I—like I'm hunting—"

"No one could possibly think that of you," said Terry, before he could stop himself. "You're just about the nicest person in Ravenclaw."

Claire blushed to the roots of her honey-brown hair, and Terry wanted to gather her up in his arms, and hug her, and kiss the top of her head, and then—but of course he couldn't. He took a deep breath and looked out over the Quidditch grounds. He absentmindedly caressed the shiny cover of the paperback book before he handed it back to her.

"I think I see Jake," he said quietly, pointing out into the grounds.

"Okay, everyone, we're going to get started," bellowed Roger Davies into his megaphone. Anthony looked up into the stands and waved to them. Claire waved back.

"Thank you," she said to Terry.

"Don't mention it," he said, thinking that his life was getting a bit complicated. It was going to be a year full of secrets to keep.

* * *

_seder_—Passover meal, encompassing the reading of the _haggadah_ (Passover story), rituals, and a feast.

_Yiddishkeit_—Jewishness

_yeshiva_—academy of Jewish learning

_tzedakah_—charity, with connotations of social justice


	7. Before the Headmaster

**Chapter 7: Before the Headmaster**

Jake wouldn't join Dumbledore's Army. He wouldn't come to Hermione's meeting at the Hog's Head. He would have no truck with bewitched parchments and magic coins. He informed Anthony and Terry that observant Jews were bound to obey the laws of the civil governments under which they lived unless they directly conflicted with the fundamental ethical precepts of the Torah, and though he loathed Umbridge as much as the next person, he wasn't aware that she had yet engaged in murder, theft, adultery, idolatry, blasphemy, or even gross cruelty . . .

"She's pretty gross," muttered Anthony.

"Ha ha," retorted Jake. "I'm serious."

"You don't seriously believe that we owe her respect and fealty?" questioned Terry.

"You can respect the office without respecting the person. That's why people who don't respect their parents as human beings are still supposed to honor them insofar as possible. It's a mitzvah, because they're honoring the office of parenthood." Terry frowned over this one, and Jake continued, "That applies to teachers, too, by the way."

"I agree that it's right to respect teachers," said Terry slowly. "And to follow the rules. Usually. But don't you think that ethical considerations can trump the established rules in times of urgency?"

"Sure, but exactly what ethical considerations come into play here? It seems to me that most of the interest in this little organization is coming from students who are taking their OWLs in the spring and are angry that Umbridge isn't preparing them adequately. Look, I don't blame you—and yes, she is a wart—"

"You know that Voldemort rose again," said Terry quietly. Anthony, who was not a sayer of the name, gasped involuntarily. "Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil," rattled off Terry quickly. "For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff comfort me. If Jake can quote chapter and verse, so can I. Isn't that what Voldemort's imposing on us? The shadow of death? A boy from our own school, that all of us knew, was killed—"

"May his memory be for blessing," replied Jake. "But frankly, I thought that serious Christians were next-door to pacifist. Isn't there something in the New Testament about turning the other cheek?"

"And I thought serious Jews were willing to fight in a righteous cause," retorted Terry. "You know, I actually read the Five Books of Moses after your bar mitzvah. All that stuff about how to raise an army, and the rules for fighting—"

"Those were national wars," snapped Jake. "Fought by an organized political power, on behalf of an organized society and government. Not a bunch of teenagers going off on their own. You know what the military age was in the kingdom of Israel?"

Twenty, thought Terry, but he wasn't positive, and anyway wizards come of age earlier than Muggles—

"Twenty," announced Jake, answering his own question.

"Well, what about the partisans in World War II? Your grandfather—"

"You want to know what _Zaide_ would say about this?" asked Anthony suddenly.

"No," muttered Jake.

"_Zaide_ would say that social justice trumps Torah law any day. That's half the point of the whole socialist tradition."

"Well, I'm not a socialist. And frankly, I think the first thing _Zaide _would say is that even if there are twenty gentiles to one Jew in this little organization, when it gets busted, the Jew is the one who'll get blamed. That's the sort of thing _Zaide_ usually says."

"He's usually right," retorted Anthony.

"Well, it's your lookout. Look, when the Ministry raises an army to fight—Him—I'll go. When Dumbledore raises an army, I'll go, even if the Ministry hasn't endorsed it. But I'm not enlisting in Harry's army. Honestly, I think it's kind of arrogant. I—I don't_ blame_ you," Jake added quickly, seeing his brother's stormy face, "I don't blame you for wanting to fight Umbridge, or—You-Know-Who. But this is illicit and disorganized and poorly thought through, and I'm afraid you'll end up doing more harm than good."

Losing Jake, they of course lost Claire as well. The only fourth-year Ravenclaw they got was Luna, who was perhaps not the best advertisement for their house. Relations between Jake and Terry, and particularly between Jake and Anthony, were strained, and it was an unhappy winter.

* * *

When one of the ickle firsties (as Anthony, drunk on his prefect status, now liked to call them) brought Terry a note summoning him to the headmaster's study, he felt sure someone in the D.A. had blown the gaff. He had made it through four and a half years at Hogwarts without once being summoned to the headmaster's study, and he was shaking . . . the only mystery was why Anthony, Michael, and Padma had apparently escaped the same summons. Could it be something else? But he hadn't broken any other rules. He was quite sure he hadn't broken any other rules. And Anthony and Michael, now, they had broken quite a lot of rules. Especially Michael. Still, it couldn't be good, being summoned to the headmaster's office. Trembling slightly, he opened the door to the headmaster's study. Professor Dumbledore surveyed him with sad eyes—a gaze creepily reminiscent of his mother's—and said quietly, "Terry Boot. Ah, yes. Sit down, Terry. Have a lemon drop."

"I—I, thank you, sir."

Dumbledore took one too, and they sucked their lemon drops in an oddly companionable silence.

"You're probably wondering why I wished to speak to you, Terry," said Professor Dumbledore and Terry nodded, wondering uncomfortably in Dumbledore could read minds. There was a word for it, he thought. He'd overheard Professor Snape telling someone.

"It's about your activities in Africa."

"A-Africa?" breathed Terry.

"Well, I assume it's Africa. You and your family frequently spend your vacations in Chad?"

Terry nodded.

"I had to look it up on a map, you know," said Dumbledore. "Chad. I've never been to Africa. I'm afraid the wizarding life can sometimes be narrowing."

"Er—most Muggle haven't been, either," pointed out Terry. "British Muggles, I mean. It's not a popular vacation spot."

"Well, Terry, suppose you tell me how you and your parents came to travel there."

"It was my grandparents' idea, to begin with, sir. My grandfather was there as a young man, after the Second World War. And when he retired, he built a small missionary lodge in the south, near the Cameroon border. And after my parents got married, my mother—she's an obstetrician—er, that's a type of Muggle Healer—"

"Yes, I know," said Professor Dumbledore, quietly amused.

"I'm sorry, sir, most wizards don't seem to know that word. Well, she got very interested in doing missionary work there. Chad has one of the highest rates of rates of maternal mortality in the world, sir, and one of the highest rates of infant mortality, too. We've been going at least once a year, usually twice, since I was six. My mother does obstetric surgery, and my father arranges drug shipments, and my sister and I just pitch in where we can. I—I know it's unusual, sir, but I really didn't mean any harm."

Dumbledore studied him quietly, and Terry thought, O Jesus, he really can read minds. Legilimency, he thought suddenly. Legilimency, and he can do it. He's a Legilimens.

Dumbledore walked to the window, wringing his hands in a slow, careless gesture, and looked out. "Snow tonight," he said. "Or rain. Freezing rain. It makes things grow," he said abruptly, as Terry stared. "Rain makes things grow. Even freezing rain, sometimes. I wish more of the students had had lives like yours, Terry. It makes you grow. But I'm worried about the potions."

"The potions?" said Terry, cautiously.

"An Invigoration Draught, I assume," said Dumbledore. "Or is it just Pepper-Up Potion?"

Terry shook his head. "The first," he murmured faintly.

"I've had a letter from the Ministry," said Dumbledore. "They say you've bought out Slug & Jiggers's supply of scarab beetles and lionfish parts on three separate occasions, and they asked me to monitor your potion-making. The Ministry can't detect minors' illicit potion-making—it can only detect certain types of magic, wand-based, levitation, and so forth—but of course it's extremely imprudent. Even in a good cause. It compromises security. And since you don't have magical parents to tell you this, the task unhappily falls to me."

"I—I'm very sorry, sir," choked Terry. "I only meant to help." You, sir, you're wiser than I'll ever be, but you haven't been to Africa.

"How long has this been going on?" asked Dumbledore.

"A-about two years."

"That long? Just you, or have the young Goldsteins been assisting?"

Terry shook his head. "They don't know, sir. I mean—I mean, it's possible they might have suspected, from what I was buying, but they never asked me and I never told them. It was just me and my sister."

"Your sister? Your sister is a Muggle, is she not?"

"She didn't do any magic," explained Terry. "She just crushed the scarab beetles and mixed them in when I told her to. She figured out what I was doing, sir, and she couldn't bear to see the people suffer . . . she's planning to be a physician, just like Mum . . ." Oh, lord, he thought, I'm going to cry. This is ridiculous. I'm fifteen. I can't cry.

Dumbledore crept up behind him and laid a calming hand on his shoulder. "You should help them, Terry. In any way you can. Your instincts were right. But I can't have you compromising magical secrecy. And the Ministry won't stand for it, you know. You need to restrain your charitable impulses now, so that you can keep a clean record and do more good in the future."

"Yes, sir," sniffed Terry unhappily. "I will, sir."

"Obeying the law is usually the right thing to do," observed Dumbledore. "Even when the law seems limiting, or when it doesn't quite cover current circumstances. Law is the compact we make with each other, you see. It makes society predictable—or even just possible. It takes a very wise person to know when it's ethical to go above or beyond the law."

Jake, thought Terry. That's what Jake said, more or less. How did he get to be so smart? But I was trying to do the right thing, when I signed up for the D.A. We were all trying to do the right thing. Do we keep going to meetings because we want to fight Voldemort, or because we want to see Harry show off his Patronus? Or because we're mad at Umbridge and this is the only way we can rebel? I really thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was motivated by a wish to do the right thing, but how certain can anyone be of his own cluttered and clouded motivations? Jake, of course, would say that motivation doesn't matter much, that what matters is simply whether or not what you're doing is good.

Dumbledore was watching him intently, his eyes fixed on Terry's forehead. And Terry thought, O lord, it's Legilimency. A wizard as powerful as Dumbledore . . . I wish I knew more about magic. I'll have to ask Anthony, but he probably can read minds. And he's reading mine right now.

"Off with you, then, Terry," said Dumbledore abruptly. "Thanks for the chat."

It must be an awful temptation if one can read minds, thought Terry, as he shut the door to the headmaster's study. Tempting to read them when you shouldn't, and tempting not to read them when you know that you probably should. There are things even Dumbledore doesn't want to know.


	8. Alienation and Convergence

**Chapter 8: Alienation and Convergence**

Summer in Africa without any illegal potion-brewing was bleak. Hamstrung by lack of power, Terry fretted and fumed and lolled on his bunk reading Muggle fantasy novels. Guiltily, he dodged his chores. René refrained from saying, "I told you so," but Terry knew what he was thinking. This is the boy who thinks too much of his own power, too much of his own pain. Who wants to solve all the world's problems before he reaches manhood. Well, it was true. He didn't want to go into the villages anymore, if he couldn't take the Invigoration Draught. Eliza submitted to Dumbledore's decree without comment, but Terry knew she was disappointed—who would have thought that a fourteen-year-old would sulk so about not getting to mash up scarab beetles?—and he caught her shirking too. They both felt thoroughly deinvigorated.

If summer in Africa was bleak, autumn at Hogwarts was bleaker. OWLs past, Terry should have embarked on his NEWT courses with renewed vigor, but his concentration faltered. Having lost both Dumbledore's Army and his secret potions project, he no longer had any practical forum in which to exercise the magic he was learning, and his future career seemed too remote to matter. As a child, Terry had cherished two career goals. Either he would become a psychiatrist, he told his father—Dad liked that plan—or he would enter the ministry. Not, he cautioned his parents, as a missionary, but just as a quiet country vicar in some nice placid village—some place with a good choir that he could conduct, and some simple human problems he could solve . . .

Of course, Hogwarts changed everything. He couldn't be a vicar now, if he wanted to stay in the magical world. He could train as an Emotional Management Healer, but he was already sensing that he wouldn't like the wizarding approach to medicine—Healing, that's what they call it, in the conviction that it's somehow more scientific than Muggle medicine—well, he was sensing that he wouldn't like the wizarding approach to Healing because it leaves out all the ethics, all the religion, most of what Terry would call the human stuff, and what's the point of being human without that? There were days when he felt like he'd had enough magical education already, enough of the complicated Latin-garbed mechanics shorn of their humanistic context. Dumbledore was often absent from the High Table that autumn, and Terry took it as a metaphor. Dumbledore doesn't realize how absent he is from the real world, he found himself thinking. He doesn't realize how irrelevant the wizarding world has made itself . . .

The only bright spot in that bleak autumn was the rapprochement in Ravenclaw Common Room. On the afternoon of the day when it became known that Hannah Abbott's mother had been murdered, Jake pulled Anthony and Terry aside and apologized. "I was wrong about the D.A.," he murmured, speaking low so that Su and Mandy, gossiping over the latest issue of _Stylin' Witch_, wouldn't hear. "I—well, it's open war now, a very dirty sort of war, with the Death Eaters preying on civilians as much as fighters, and it makes no sense to sit and be slaughtered. We've got to do something."

"Damn right we do," said Anthony, "but much good all that D.A. training did us. Luna keeps following me around and asking why I didn't come to Harry's aid last spring—which is strange, actually, because I don't think the coins ever heated up. Either they didn't work or Harry didn't use them."

"I don't think that wanting to obey rules is wrong," said Jake thoughtfully. "The whole premise of _halacha_ is that people aren't intrinsically good or bad, just kind of selfish, and they need rules to help them lead purposeful, ethical lives. It really works—at least, it really works for me—but I must have misapplied the principles in this case. And to be honest, I was a little squeamish about using magic in an unsupervised setting. I spent half the summer thinking about my bar mitzvah _parsha_, you know, the bit about not engaging in sorcery and divination, and I think what it actually means is not doing Voldemort's kind of magic—"

He's saying the name now?, thought Terry. He must really have turned a corner. But the thing is, he was no more in the wrong than I was—

"—setting oneself on a par with God. That's why the Bible objects to Divination, I think—it's a way of trying to be God. And that's what Voldemort's doing, basically, in killing so many people so haphazardly yet trying not to die himself. He's trying to be God."

"Amen," said Anthony. "For once, a_ d'var_ I can agree with. So you're going to embrace the righteous cause?"

"When the opportunity arises." Sheepishly, the brothers shook hands.

"Actually, Dumbledore thought you were right," muttered Terry. "About obeying civil laws. He didn't approve—"

"You told Dumbledore about the D.A.?!" exclaimed Anthony. "Look, Terry, I like Dumbledore as much as the next guy, but you were under oath—"

"I didn't tell him!" retorted Terry. "I'm sure he knew anyway—you're daft to think that anything stays secret from Dumbledore—but we never discussed it. No, he told me to curtail my activities in Africa."

"What the f– were you doing in Africa?"

"Making potions."

"Illegal potions? Hallucinogenics, that kind of stuff?"

"No," muttered Terry. "Invigoration Draughts."

"Why—" started Anthony, and stopped.

"The lionfish parts," said Jake slowly.

"And the scarab beetles."

"I always wondered," said Jake.

"I was always afraid you knew."

"Well, we knew you were up to something," guffawed Anthony. "But I thought it was—er—experimentation, not charity. Why ever did Dumbledore make you stop?"

"The Ministry got interested in my shopping habits. Apparently I was endangering magical security. And Dumbledore told me to save my reputation for another day, so that I could fight these battles better later on."

"How long were you doing this?" asked Jake.

"Couple of years."

"And no one knew?"

"Just my sister. She did some of the work."

Jake shook his head.

"Dumbledore's advice isn't that different from what you said," pointed out Anthony. "About obeying the law, even when you're not sure it's right, because it's the foundation of society, and society is a good."

Jake grimaced. "This is one case in which I would have been proud to be on the wrong side of the law. You know, the highest form of charity is putting people in a position in which they can help themselves?"

But wizards don't seem to believe in charity, thought Terry morosely. At least not wizards other than Jake and Anthony—and Claire. Not even Dumbledore—but he's a good man, and I don't know what I'm doing in the wizarding world, so I'll try not to question. "Is the D.A. over now, do you think?" he said aloud.

"Surely Harry would have told us if it were still going on."

"If he does," said Jake, "tell him that I would join, if he's still willing to have me."

"There's not much point, though, is there?" suggested Anthony. "It doesn't have to be underground, now that Umbridge is gone, and we've got a real DADA teacher for once."

"A wart, but a clever wart," pronounced Jake.

In the end they agreed that Anthony would ask Ron or Hermione about the D.A. after the next prefect meeting. Ron opined that Harry was pursuing mysterious studies on his own now and didn't have time for the D.A. anymore. So they put away the enchanted coins, and let their minds drift to other things.

In the Muggle world, when teenagers had crushes that didn't work out, they blew over. Terry knew this, because Eliza told him things. Eliza went to boarding school now, which she loathed, and she held fast to the conviction that it was Terry's fault that she had been sent there. Their parents' original plan had been to send both of them to day schools in Nottingham. But after Terry turned out to be magic and had to go to Hogwarts, the only remaining barriers to Mummy's increasingly vocal desire to devote herself full-time to missionary work were Eliza's education and Dad's common sense conviction that Chad was not a very nice place to live year-round. Dad's common sense, though much valued by his offspring, never carried much weight in the face of Mummy's idealism. So Eliza was dispatched to boarding school at thirteen, and Mummy betook herself to the mission house, with Dad flying in at frequent intervals, and the ghastly but beloved mock Tudor villa in Nottingham relegated to the status of a _pied-a-terre_ . . . All of which was, clearly, Terry's fault. Anyone could trace the progression of events. But Eliza loved her brother anyway, most of the time, and so she continued to tell him things.

When Eliza's friends had crushes that didn't work out, the boys simply disappeared. They melted into the woodwork. They flunked out of school, or they moved on to Oxford, or St. Andrews, or Sandhurst. Or they stopped coming to mixers, or they grew their hair long and acquired new nicknames so that even if they did keep coming to the same old tired mixers at the same old girls' boarding schools, Eliza's friends could pretend they didn't recognize them anymore. And then they met new boys, and the cycle started over again. It was all quite easy and painless, and at fourteen, Eliza's friends still had the Muggle fantasy of unlimited options. A virtually endless supply of teenage public school boys.

This was not the way of things at Hogwarts. Five boys to a dormitory, and five girls in the other wing. Forty students to a year. Fewer than three hundred in the entire school, and those were the only options, unless one went abroad—or married out, as Anthony put it. Kevin Entwhistle, who was Muggle-born, was rumored to have a Muggle girlfriend in the holidays, but he was exceedingly cagey about the arrangement. When he finally confided in Terry, on the theory that Muggle-borns must stick together, he explained that the relationship had only lasted three weeks and that it was awkward, never being able to speak freely. The girl talked endlessly about bands Kevin hadn't heard, T.V. shows he hadn't seen, and books he hadn't read, and while it was nice to get some action, he did not think that dating Muggles was a good long-term prospect.

So you couldn't blame the Ravenclaw boys, really, if they were most of them still thinking about the same girls they were thinking about two years ago.

Jake marched into the Ravenclaw Common Room one bleak Saturday afternoon after Halloween carrying a braided candle, a tiny jar of cloves, and a wine bottle.

"Look what Mum and Dad sent me," he announced to Anthony, Terry, Padma, Michael, and Michael's current girlfriend Cho. "Owl post."

"Oh, for God's sake—" started Anthony.

"That's a pretty candle," interjected Padma. "How do they make them?"

"D'you like it?" asked Anthony quickly. "It's called a _havdalah_ candle. Look, there are five separate wicks, and they're braided together while the wax is still warm—"

"Is that real wine?" inquired Michael. "I mean—alcoholic?"

"I've only got one bottle," warned Jake. "And please don't tell Flitwick."

"Hey, Kevin!" shouted Michael across the Common Room. Kevin strode over to them, trailed by Luna Lovegood. Claire, who was sitting at a small desk near the window, looked up from her homework to see what was going on. Terry smiled at her, and Claire stood up and quietly made her way over to the group, and Terry felt terrific until he noticed that Jake was waving her to join them.

"Wow! Are we going to hex someone?" inquired Luna, fingering her butterbeer cork necklace. Cho rolled her eyes.

"No," said Jake, "we're going to make _havdalah_."

"Cloves are very effective against gytrashes," announced Luna loudly. "If you ever see a gytrash coming after you, don't run away. The right thing to do is turn around and stuff cloves up the hound's nose—"

"Well, that's not what we're doing this evening," said Jake firmly. "We're celebrating the end of Shabbat. Terry, will you take the spice box? Claire, would you like to hold the candle?"

"Be careful with the spices," whispered Luna to Terry. "Cloves can be very disorienting."

"Havdalah means separation," continued Jake. "It's a short ceremony that hallows the separation between the holy time of Shabbat and the quotidian time of ordinary weekdays. I'm going to recite a bit of Hebrew, and then you'll see what we do with the candle and the cloves, Luna. They're meant to be reassuring, not disorienting. And then, yes, Michael, we are going to drink the wine. Kevin, would you turn off the lights in this part of the Common Room? Thanks. _Hineh El y'shuati, evtach v'lo efchad . . ._"

The Hebrew rolled out magnificently. Terry, who had watched the Goldsteins perform _havdalah_ a dozen times in London, joined in on the refrain and so, after a minute, did Anthony. Jake blessed the spices and Terry passed them around; Jake blessed the light of the candle and they all held up their fingers to see the reflected glow of the leaping, multi-wicked flame.

"Fire is a good thing," announced Padma when Anthony turned the lights back on. "As a symbol, I mean. Hinduism involves lots of fire. To think that this is the sixth year in a row that I've missed Divali—"

"Why don't you celebrate it here?" asked Terry.

"Why—there are only about three Hindus in the entire school," stuttered Padma. "No one would come."

"I would," said Luna. Padma looked as if that was not much of an enticement to proceed.

"So would I," murmured Claire.

"We all would," said Jake firmly, "if you wanted us to."

"Well," sighed Anthony, when they were walking down to dinner half an hour later, "that was totally bizarre."

"How so?" asked Terry.

"A _havdalah_ party at Hogwarts for a dozen people, only two of whom are actually Jewish?"

"I thought it was nice," said Terry. "No harm in exposing wizards to a bit of religion. Any religion. Are you going to do it again next week, Jake?"

"Yes."

Anthony sniffed. "Little rabbi."

"Padma seemed to like it," pointed out Jake. "Look, I'm trying to live the way a Jew is supposed to. I wish I had other Jews to do that with, but I don't, so I'm going to use the friends I've got, and you can come or not as you please."

"You ought to transliterate the Hebrew," said Terry quietly. "At least for that song at the end."

Next Saturday afternoon, Jake had handouts for the crowd. Michael and Cho pointedly removed themselves to the other side of the Common Room when they saw Jake coming, but Padma came back, and so did Luna, and so did Claire—and so, sheepishly, did Anthony. Terry was not particularly surprised to see Claire folding one of the transliterated copies of "_Eliyahu Hanavi_" into her jeans pocket afterward.

"It's a pretty ceremony," she said apologetically to Terry, when Jake was out of earshot.

"They do it every week, at home," said Terry.

"You've been to stay with them in London, haven't you?" asked Claire.

"Every summer."

"Are they—well, are they nice? I mean the parents—"

"They're extremely nice," said Terry. "There's a third brother, Meir. He's almost eleven and he's starting at Hogwarts next year. And Mrs. Goldstein's widowed father lives with them too."

"_Zaide_?" suggested Claire.

"_Zaide_," confirmed Terry. "He's a Muggle. They're very comfortable with Muggles."

Claire nodded thoughtfully. Terry took a deep breath and said, "Look—Claire—I'll introduce you to them sometime if you want. They don't usually come to King's Cross, because they've lived in London all their lives and the boys can find their way home from King's Cross blindfold, but if you can manage to bump into us in Diagon Alley sometime—"

Claire blushed to the roots of her honeyed hair, but she said, "Thanks, Terry." Gently she brushed his arm and said, "Thanks." And he watched her dash away.


	9. Solo

**Chapter 9: Solo**

Terry and Kevin were lolling in the dormitory, Terry leafing distractedly through J.R.R. Tolkien's _Fellowship of the Ring_ and Kevin debating the comparative merits of various broomsticks, more to himself than to Terry, on the night when the Battle of Hogwarts erupted in the Astronomy Tower.

"There, that's the one I want," announced Kevin, holding up an animated multi-page spread in _Which Broomstick_. "They cut the price on the Nimbus 2000 when the Nimbus 2001 came out, and it's quite economical now. My parents said they'd get me a broom as a coming-of-age present—they mean eighteen, of course, not seventeen—"

"Mm-hm," murmured Terry. His own seventeenth birthday had passed without comment. His parents weren't really into present-giving at birthdays. They tended to see each passing year as a fresh occasion to recommit oneself to the service of mankind, not to acquire Game Boys and silver watches and the like. But Terry, awaking in the frosty dormitory on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, had realized with a jolt that he was not only of age in the wizarding world but also older than the majority of the population of Chad. He had entered the senior half of one of his small worlds. Given how little I have things figured out, he reflected, it's no wonder Chad is such a mess, dominated as it is by an adolescent population . . .

"They're awfully chuffed about Robby going to university," continued Kevin, leaning back on his bed and staring up at the heavy blue draperies that surmounted it. "He's only the second person in the family to go. One of my cousins was at Leicester, but York is in a whole other league . . ."

"It's very well ranked," allowed Terry.

"They keep asking me if I won't go, too. It would be one up on the aunts and uncles if I did—two sons who're university graduates—and they keep pointing out that I got As on four of my OWLs. Of course they don't understand that the As were the grades I was the least happy with . . ."

Terry laughed.

"What about your parents?" asked Kevin. "Do they want you to go to university?"

"Uh—no, not particularly," said Terry. "It hasn't really come up. I mean, they'd be happy if I did go, but I think it would be equally all right if I didn't." He always found his parents' attitude a little hard to explain to his classmates. They genuinely trusted him. He hadn't realized how unusual that was until he came to Hogwarts.

"Do they like the Healing scheme?"

Terry shrugged. His NEWT program was technically pre-Healing, not because he was particularly committed to it, but simply because he had to have some system for choosing which NEWTs to take, and pre-Healing made Flitwick happy. In fact, though, a Healing career, even—especially—a career in Emotional Management Healing, which is what he'd told Flitwick he'd do, was starting to seem pretty pointless. Without the ethical component, without the spiritual component, Emotional Management Healing was just so much navel-gazing. He knew if he tried to analyze other wizards' emotional management problems, he'd soon end up quoting the Bible at them, or quoting René, or alternatively quoting Jake, and that's not what wizards want to hear . . .

"Was that thunder?" said Kevin suddenly.

"It sounds like a bolt of lightening struck very close to the castle."

"Maybe even struck one of the towers?" guessed Kevin.

"Maybe," said Terry, tossing down the Tolkien. "Oxford has a joint degree course in Philosophy and Theology," he said quietly.

"You want to be a pastor?!" exclaimed Kevin. "A Muggle pastor?"

"No," said Terry. "I thought about it when I was a kid, but it doesn't make sense any more." He sighed. "Still, the Muggles know some things we don't. I wish I could bring the good parts of the Muggle world into this world."

"Personally," said Kevin, staring up at the blue draperies, "personally, I'm quite happy to be quit of it . . ."

There was a ruckus on the stairs, and Jake, the youngest of the prefects, burst abruptly into their dormitory and flew to the nearest trunk.

"What the—" began Kevin.

"What's wrong?" asked Terry.

"This isn't Anthony's trunk," muttered Jake, kicking it aside.

"It's Michael's," said Terry. "That one's Anthony's." He pointed. "But why—"

Jake threw open Anthony's trunk and started tossing the contents on the floor: battered textbooks, sweaty Quidditch clothing, wrinkled pyjamas that, Terry strongly suspected, were handed down from _Zaide_, but none of them said anything, not even Michael, because they didn't want to make Anthony feel bad. "Where is it?"

"Where is what?" said Terry patiently.

"Aha!" Jake lifted the enchanted Galleon from the D.A. aloft and slammed the trunk shut. "It's burning hot!"

Terry jumped off his bed and grabbed the Galleon from Jake's hand. So it was.

"Will you please tell me what the _hell_ is going on?" said Kevin.

"Your call," said Jake, gesturing to Terry.

"What _is _going on?" said Terry. "Where's your brother?"

"Doing Transfiguration homework with Padma. I'm going to go tell them, and see what's up. Tell Kevin or not, but get going." Jake disappeared down the stairs.

"Terry, will you _please_ stop talking in code and take a minute to tell what the _hell_ is going on around here?"

"Get your wand," said Terry, "and put on your shoes." And he told him.

The Common Room was in an uproar. Flitwick was nowhere to be found, and the seventh-year prefects were both mysteriously absent. ("Rendez-vous," muttered Michael, "Quidditch pitch, the foolish bastards, but don't say I told you.") Authority thus devolved on Anthony and Padma, neither of whom had the slightest inclination to stay put when the enchanted coins were burning. Anthony was guarding the port hole like an attack dog, periodically stealing glances into the corridor, while Padma tried to persuade an increasingly hysterical Emily Sansom, Jake's opposite number as fifth-year prefect, to take charge of the disorderly scene in the Common Room. Jake, growing impatient, threw up his hands at Emily Sansom and declared, "Well, we'll just have to divide forces. I'm going now. Who's with me?"

"I am," shouted Michael, and Anthony pulled open the porthole. Jake and Michael tumbled into the hallway one after the other, to the sound of heavy boots crunching on the stone pavement. And then, sickeningly, came two dull thuds, one after another, on the grimy flagstones. Anthony, climbing out the porthole, collapsed suddenly on the threshold and started sobbing, "M-m-malfoy!" as blood poured from a score of small wounds.

"Malfoy?" asked Terry, as he and Kevin rushed forward to pull Anthony through the porthole. He was heavier than they had reckoned on—the largest of the three boys—and he collapsed again, painfully, on the low divider at the foot of the porthole, clutching his stomach.

"Malfoy—in the corridor—cried 'Secta-sem-s-s—'"

"Did Jake and Michael go after him?"

"I'm—black out," muttered Anthony, clutching the side of his chest. "Blood—." Emily Sansom burst into tears.

"Terry," said Kevin quietly, peering out the porthole, "Terry, we've got a problem."

"They're—they're not dead?" breathed Padma, who had crept up behind Kevin and was peering over his shoulder.

"Who—who dead?" sniffed Emily, as Claire, who had been trying to comfort her, froze.

"They're not dead," said Terry, hastily unbuttoning Anthony's shirt.

"Terry," whispered Kevin, so low that only Padma could hear, "it doesn't look good." Padma, holding her wand before her in both hands, like a candle, was already slipping into the corridor.

"Someone's got to cover her," muttered Terry in anguish. "Kevin, just go. Carefully, and not far. Claire—Cho—anyone, would you please pull Anthony out of the porthole and lay him out on one of the sofas—or the floor in you can't lift him. He's in a dead faint and he's bleeding all over. Take off all of his outer clothes and use them as bandages—the worst damage seems to be on the arms and chest—we've got to get help, only I don't know where Flitwick is and I don't see how we're going to get Madam Pomfrey up here tonight—" for in the distance, through the open porthole, they could now hear explosions echoing through the stone corridors.

Claire and Cho, who loathed each other, nevertheless both stepped forward and pulled Anthony heavily from the doorway. Emily Sansom, sniffing heavily, herded the younger students to the far end of the Common Room and forbid them to open the windows. Mandy Brocklehurst, in a rare burst of inspiration, tossed some Floo Powder in the fireplace and teleconferenced with Madam Pomfrey—and so they first heard that the Dark Mark had been seen above the Astronomy Tower.

In the corridor, Padma and Kevin had pulled the inert bodies of Jake and Michael to the side wall and lined them up head to toe. "They're breathing," Padma reassured Terry when he came to look. "It wasn't Avada Kedavra. Just a couple of Stunners, or a Freezing Charm. That's probably what got Anthony too."

"They're not bleeding like Anthony," pointed out Kevin. "I think they're just Stunned, but Anthony got hit by something else."

"How do you treat Stunning?" muttered Terry, very conscious that a doctor's son—and pre-Healing student—ought to know that sort of thing. "How long does it last?"

"Not very long," said Kevin. "But they both fell flat-out on the stone pavement—there's probably concussion on top of the Stunning—"

"We should get them back into the Common Room," sighed Terry. "You're strong enough to hold one end, right, Padma? I don't want to bring more people out into the corridor if we can help it."

"Aren't we going to go find the battle?" asked Kevin.

Terry shrugged. "We don't even know where it is."

"It's in the Astronomy Tower," hallooed Mandy helpfully from the porthole. "At least one dead already, Madam Pomfrey said."

Terry shook his head. "I don't mean to be a coward," he said quietly to Kevin and Padma. "But we've got to start by addressing the problems we've got here."

* * *

Jake, slightly bruised about the cheekbones, rapped on the door of the sixth-year dormitory when Terry was packing after the funeral. "I just wanted to say goodbye," he said. "Professor Flitwick told me that Hogwarts might not reopen in the autumn."

Terry bit his lip. Rumors had been circulating, but this was the first official news he had heard.

"If it doesn't open," said Jake, "you're welcome to come stay with us in London. Anthony's going to try to finish his NEWT courses on his own—he's mad as hell right now, all charged up to get qualified and fight—and we'll be easy to reach if anything happens."

Terry sighed. "I don't know what to do. It's hard to leave when there's a war on—but I haven't been of much use so far."

"Well, you've kept your head better than I have," muttered Jake ruefully.

Terry laughed. "Your principles were right every time," he said, "and your heart's in the right place. You've just been trying a little too hard."

"But you don't want to come stay with us?"

"Well, I've been thinking, if Hogwarts doesn't reopen, I could stay in Chad with my mother for a year, do something obviously useful. Or maybe it's time for me to pursue some other sort of education. This is such an unbalanced curriculum. All this emphasis on science—well, you know what I mean, on spellwork and potions, and practically no humanities, so that wizards hardly seem to know what to do with their powers, other than the general principles of controlling yourself and doing no lasting harm."

"What are you thinking?" asked Jake suspiciously.

"Oxford has a course in Philosophy and Theology," said Terry. "I could do my A-levels pretty quickly, I think, if I chose something like English, General Studies, and Religious Studies. I've been reading on my own—"

"You want to cross over?" said Jake.

"It only takes four years to get a degree," pointed out Terry. "Three, if I just do theology. It might be a good antidote to Hogwarts."

"What are you going to do with a theology degree in the wizarding world?"

Terry shrugged. "Be a human being. Be a Christian. Be an alternative to Voldemort. Do some active kind of good that will catch people's imagination so that they don't get seduced—don't you ever think about it?" he asked. "About being a rabbi?"

Jake shook his head. "I have every intention of living my life as an observant Jew, but I don't need to be a rabbi to do that." He paused. "Actually, I'm planning to be an Emotional Management Healer."

Terry laughed.

"What?"

"I thought about that," said Terry. "But it seems kind of pointless without the Christian perspective, or at least some systematic ethical perspective—"

"I'm not planning to do it without a systematic ethical perspective," asserted Jake. "I'll be using my knowledge. All my knowledge, believe me."

"St. Mungo's isn't going to like that," warned Terry.

"So I'll start my own practice," said Jake. "I'll get the training at St. Mungo's, get it over with, and strike out on my own. I think I can make Jewishly-informed Emotional Management Healing attractive to a secular wizarding clientele—"

Terry chuckled.

"What?" said Jake.

"You're not going to have an easy life."

"No," said Jake, "neither are you. Whichever side you're on. But you ought to stay in the wizarding world, you know. There aren't going to be any Christians here until someone sets an example. And there aren't going to be any wizarding charities until someone starts one. There are people like your parents who can go heal Muggles in Africa, but they can't do anything in the wizarding world. You can. It's a small enough community that one person, or a few people, can make a difference—"

Terry sighed. "Following that reasoning, I shouldn't even go to Chad for the summer. Not while there's a war on."

"You've got your Apparition license now, right?" asked Jake. "I'll send you an owl if anything happens. Or Anthony will."

"I don't think I can apparate all the way from Chad to England," objected Terry. "It's trickier than it looks."

"Well, break it into four or five stages and do it that way. You know, Chad to Morocco, Morocco to Spain, Spain to Holland, Holland to England. You could do that, right?"

"Right," muttered Terry.

Jake walked to the window and looked out. The crowd that attended the funeral had not yet dispersed, and they could hear the muffled hubbub through the open casements.

"It matters," he said. "Terry, it really matters what you do. You know, you changed my entire image of what a Christian was? You personally. The handful of serious Christians I'd met before spouted cant all the time, and when they found out I was Jewish, they were either incredibly patronizing or they tried to convert me. You're not like that at all. You could make Christianity attractive to all the lapsed Christians in the wizarding world. You're real."

Terry smiled wryly.

"Spend the summer studying the structure of your parents' mission," advised Jake. "Figure out what works. Then use the notes to plan the charity you're going to start in the wizarding world. That's where you're going, right? God made you magic for a reason. Exercise your free will, but don't try to buck fate too much."

Terry stood up. "You ought to see something of Claire," he said abruptly. "This summer. You should try to see something of Claire."

Jake whirled around to face Terry and stood stock still. His gaze was expressive.

"I think she's made her choice," said Terry quietly. "Just—don't waste it, okay?"

Jake grimaced. "I still don't think it's going to work," he murmured.

"I do," said Terry. "Give her a chance. And if she tells you that she's willing to live as a Jew—"

"What?!" exclaimed Jake.

"Just give her a chance," said Terry, closing his trunk. "Just give it a chance."

* * *

Once, when he and Eliza were flying solo to Ndjamena to join their parents, who had preceded them to Chad, Terry fell into conversation with two young Mormon missionaries. Blonde, fresh-faced, very American, very young, they spoke of their mission with infectious enthusiasm. They had a startlingly good understanding of Africa in some respects and a startlingly poor knowledge of the continent in other respects. But, Terry thought, listening to them, it didn't really matter. They had such a perfect knowledge of themselves, such inner groundedness, that they would subsist happily anywhere, would adjust to any conditions, no matter how poorly they understood them. They would float above the clouds.

Dad met them at the airport in Ndjamena and, when the two young missionaries were safely out of earshot, remarked ruefully that Mormons were barely Christians in his book, but Terry still felt a faint kinship. Aboard the rickety prop plane that carried them south, he gazed out at the thin bright air and thought about the hours and days of his life he'd spent on trains and airplanes, season after season, year after year, from six to seventeen. Back and forth. Nottingham. London. Hogwarts. Chad. Dumbledore was right. Not many wizards grow up this way. Not many Muggles, either.

In some ways, it's a blessing, fitting in nowhere. It gives one perspective.

In some ways, it's a blessing, not being loved. It gives one a strange sort of freedom. A bitter but exhilarating freedom.

For now, he's flying solo.

THE END

Author note: Many thanks to those who encouraged me to write this story. It was originally intended to be a one-shot of perhaps 3000-4000 words, but it grew and grew as I reflected on the manifold problems of living in the wizarding world, either as a Christian or as a Jew. There are, I know, still many loose ends, as well as vast topics (such as the state of Israel) that I never even raised. I hope some other fanfic writers will take on the challenge of exploring the wizarding world from a religious perspective!


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